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theoriginalladya · 5 years

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28: any scene/line you wrote that you didn’t expect to write/that surprised you once it was written?

Simple answer: ALL OF IT!

Longer answer/explanation: No, seriously, I first started getting interested in writing when I was in high school. I’d go to every writer’s workshop they had whenever I could get out of class, and I really enjoyed it. But then college hit and any/all creative juice I had just .. vanished. WRITER’S BLOCK. That lasted through college and on through grad school and even through my teaching years. That didn’t mean I didn’t read or do research for potential story ideas - I did, but nothing ever got written but the notes.

After ten years or so, after I left teaching and moved to where I live now, after I got away from academia and started my life ‘over’, the muses started to poke at me. Slow at first, but it started trickling out. (I look back now and shudder at those pieces - which I still have, some 25 years later) I found encouragement in unexpected places (my now Ex, for starters; I sure wasn’t going to get it from my family, even if they knew I was trying to write), and it kept on going.

The biggest push was when my Ex got me Dragon Age for Christmas in 2009. That changed my whole world! Story ideas started to flow. Mass Effect created a TIDAL WAVE, and it hasn’t stopped yet. My fandoms are relatively limited (DA, ME, Horizon Zero Dawn (maybe), Werewolf: The Apocalypse), but I’ve now ventured back toward writing original fiction too, and so ... yeah.

ALL OF IT.

But, if you want something more specific, hmm ... *rolls d20 ....*

~~~~

(taken from my WIP, Mari’s Men; this is the initial draft and needs editing, but it’s a story I am incredibly invested in and will some day be satisfied with)

“Someone approaches.”

Little John’s whispered warning was just loud enoughto catch Marian’s ears. Carefully, sheeased her way far enough out onto the tree branch to glimpse the figureapproaching them. From this height andstill distant, all she could determine was that he was dressed in darkclothing. It was several minutes beforeshe could narrow it down to the black robes of a priest. He stood tall, broad shouldered, and had thegeneral shape of a man who might be a soldier, she thought.

“Black canon,” Much mumbled from below. The shrubs surrounding him showed only theslightest hint of movement as he altered his position, resembling that of abreeze blowing through.

Her gaze turned again to the man approaching. Much, as a hunter, had excellent eyesight andcould see more detail than she or even Little John from further away. She quickly considered her options. She had inherited Robyn today, so thedecision was hers to make. There weredangers in approaching men of the cloth and incurring their wrath or the wrathof the good Lord above was not on Marian’s list of duties this day. “I will speak to him,” she murmured beforescurrying backwards on the limb. Shecarefully lowered herself to the ground behind the base of the tree andadjusted her hood. Drawing her bow andnocking an arrow into place, she took a deep breath before stepping out ontothe path.

Robyn’s timing was, as always, excellent and thepriest, now near enough to recognize as a black canon as Much suggested, wasbrought up short. “Why do you block myway?” he demanded irritably.

Robyn, bow still lowered, stood casually before him,hood drawn far enough forward to hide the upper half of his face fromonlookers. “You travel through my landswithout permission,” he replied. “Paythe tax and you shall be free to continue.”

The priest scowled, eyes narrowing as if trying topeer beneath the hood. “These are theking’s lands.”

“And I am caretaker for good King Richard,” Robyncountered. “Know this, you will pay oneway or another before we are through. Either the tax with coin, or with your life for trespassing on theking’s land. What say you?”

The canon straightened, rising to his full heightwhich was substantially taller than Robyn. “And you expect to enforce this law of yours?” he scoffed. He took a step forward towards Robyn.

Robyn, quicker than it took to blink, had his bowraised, aimed at the man’s heart, pulled the bowstring to its fullextension. The canon wore no armor; thepiercing would go straight through. “Ido,” Robyn replied, “and I should think you would see that. I wish no quarrel with you, canon.”

“No,” the prior replied, “you wish only to rob me ofwhat I do not have.”

Robyn’s head tilted slightly to the side. “The nearest priory is that of Thurgarton,”he decided. “Do not tell me you aredestitute. The conditions of the canonsthere are well known among the rest of the world.”

“I am a prior of Fiskerton,” he said. Another scowl, darker this time, marked hisface. “I was banished from Thurgartonbecause I opposed Prior Thomas.”

“Don’t believe him, Robyn!” shouted Little John fromthe left.

“Aye,” Much called out. From the way his voice carried, he had workedhis way around the priest without notice. “They tax us as heavily as the king and his family!”

“We don’t!” the canon insisted. Sighing, he pinched the bridge of hisnose. “Or, rather, I don’t. I was banished fromThurgarton was because I protested the deviation from the traditions of ourorder: poverty, chastity and obedience.”

“Banished?” Robyn challenged. “I find that difficult to believe!”

“He lies!” Much shouted, now further to Robyn’s rightbut still behind the canon. Robyn had nodoubt the man’s bow was aimed and ready.

“My disagreements with Prior Thomas run deep,” heinsisted. “We both were in the runningfor the position. Unfortunately for me,Thomas has a better relationship with Prince John.”

Betterrelationship. They acerbic tone he used left no doubt thatthis prior was, like many others within the church, expecting to be brought upthrough the ranks along with the future king.

“And if you had succeeded instead of Prior Thomas?”Robyn asked.

His eyes were dark to begin with and the slits theynow became were enough to hint at anger, deep and profound. “Thurgarton would be a better community,” hereplied, “and one not so closely tied to a spoiled prince.”

It was that last that caught Robyn’s attention and thepure hatred (??) in his tone that made the final decision. Carefully relaxing hold on the bowstring andlowering the weapon, Robyn said, “If you are from Fiskerton, why are you notthere now?”

“Even that has now been denied me,” he replied. “Prior Thomas, with Prince John’s support,has relieved me of my duties.” Hesighed, eyes looking upward toward the tree-filled sky. “I was heading north and considering myoptions.”

“Why north?”

“It is where the road leads?” He shrugged, eyes falling to settle uponRobyn again. “I have little but what Iwear,” he admitted. “I have no coin forlodging or food. Kill me if you must, butI leave nothing behind.”

Stepping forward, Robyn waved a hand so Little Johnand Much could see it. “What if I wereto offer you a cathedral beneath the skies, canon?” Robyn asked. “According to those in positions of power, weare nothing but a group of misguided souls. But we are more than that, and we could use spiritual guidance, if youare of a mind.”

He drew back a step or two and the startled expressionwas easy to identify. “To what end?”

“Chastity. Poverty. Obedience,” Robynreplied. “The poverty we can provide,the chastity, well, I wouldn’t hold your breath on that count.” Both Little John and Much chuckled. They were nearer now, but still remained outof easy sight. “The obedience would beup to you and your skills of persuasion. Do you search for a challenge?”

The canon blinked a few times, looked around them fora moment, then back at Robyn. “Acathedral under the skies, you said?”

Robyn nodded. “Our camp is in the forest. Yourcongregation among those most persecuted. This is the only home they have. They come to us willingly, each aiding according to their ownabilities. We have bakers and tanners,blacksmiths, armorers, seamstresses and ….”

The prior nodded, cutting off Robyn’s speech. “And outlaws,” he concluded in a voice loudenough for Much and Little John to hear, “in desperate need of Divineintervention.” Taking a deep breath, hesaid, “I will gladly take on the duties of spiritual advisor, master outlaw,but with one stipulation.”

“That being?”

“I get to speak to you face to face and see you eye toeye.”

A moment of stunned silence rippled around the area,and Robyn heard sputtered protests rise from Much and Little John. Raising a hand, they silenced. “I am but a name, priest,” Robynreplied. “A rumor, a legend among thelocal folk. I am nothing but --”

“You are their leader, are you not?” hecountered. “I will give my pledge toyou, and you alone, but I would do it face to face.”

Sighing, Robyn nodded. Shouldering the bow, gloved hands rose and carefully eased the hoodback, settling it around Marian’s neck. She looked up at the priest, green-grey eyes meeting stark brown for along moment and not flinching. Offeringher hand, she told him, “Welcome to Sherwood, prior. Have you a name we can call you?”

Unfazed by the appearance of a woman beneath thearcher’s clothing, he extended a hand and took hers. “Tuck,” he replied. “I am called Prior Tuck.”

Marian smiled, full recognition settling in. “And you might have heard of me as LadyMarian FitzWalter,” she told him, “if you have been in these parts for anylength of time. But these days I am LadyMarian of Loxley.”

His eyes widened in surprise. “Lord William’s sister?” She nodded. “I was sent to Fiskerton just after your brother’s return as lord,” heexplained. “I heard that you came withhim to visit his lands.”

“It has been a long time, and things are certainlydifferent than I hoped,” she said.

“I thought you were governing in your brother’sabsence?”

“I am,” she agreed, “but Providence has given me anotherpurpose as well.” Little John and Muchjoined them then and Marian introduced them. “The legend of Robyn and his hoode has taken on new meaning these days,and we try to put it to good use.”

“The Lord has truly guided me then,” he murmured. “In all honesty, once I was relieved of myduties at Fiskerton, I had no idea where to go. I thought perhaps to York or other points north, but I know no onethere.”

Smiling, Marian nodded towards the north andeast. “Come with us, prior,” she encouraged. “We have just what you need.”

#ladya replies #original fic #robin hood #Mari's Men #Robyn Hoode #Much #Little John #Prior Tuck #writer's meme #you asked! lol #long post #guileandgall

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yasbxxgie · 5 years

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Tomorrow, June 22, would have been legendary SF novelist and short story writer Octavia Butler’s 72nd birthday. She died in 2006—much too young, at only 58—already a certified genius who had a profound impact on many readers and writers across the world. Not surprisingly, this includes many of the best writers of SF, fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror working today, and so to celebrate Butler’s birthday, I’ve collected a few of their thoughts on her influence.

Of course, the writers quoted below are not the only ones to love or be influenced by Butler—not by far. That list might actually be infinite, and at least also includes Wayétu Moore, Rivers Solomon, Sarah Pinsker, Nalo Hopkinson, Lester Spence, Valjeanne Jeffers, K. Tempest Bradford, and Karen Joy Fowler. The below are simply missives from a few writers and artists whom I found discussing the great Octavia Butler’s influence—on their own work and otherwise—at length, to help us consider the lasting good she’s done for literature.

Nnedi Okorafor

In her introduction to the graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s Kindred, Okorafor writes:

I first came across Octavia’s work around 2001, when I was well on my way to identifying as a black female writer of speculative fiction. I was attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University, and the organizers had brought my group to the local bookstore. As I strolled through the aisles, something extraordinary caught my eye, something I’d only ever seen once before in the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookstore: a cover featuring a dark-skinned black woman.

I was staring at Wild Seed by Octavia Estelle Butler

There was only one copy of the book there on that fateful day. I grabbed it, clasped it to my chest as if someone was going to snatch it from me, quickly bought it, and ran to my dorm room to start reading.

That was the beginning of my bingeing on Octavia Butler’s works.

In the previous weeks at Clarion, I had just begun writing about an angry Nigerian woman in pre-colonial Nigeria who’d been run out of her village because she’d developed the ability to fly. I was one of two people of color in the writing group, and I was uncomfortable about workshopping my story. Plus, I’d never read a purely speculative story set anywhere on the continent of Africa that addressed womanhood and patriarchy bluntly.

When I look back, it’s clear to me that I discovered Octavia right when I needed her. Reading Wild Seed, a story that featured an ageless shape-shifting Nigerian woman, blew my mind. And there is nothing like seeing a story in print that is similar to what you are trying to write. In may ways, reading Wild Seed proved that what I was writing was okay, that people like me could be a part of this canon. This was a very big deal to me.

And it looks like Okorafor is going to take Butler’s influence even further: just a few months ago, we got the news that Amazon Prime Video was developing a series based on Butler’s Patternist series, to be co-written by Okorafor and director Wanuri Kahiu.

Nisi Shawl

In 2017, Strange Horizons published a letter Nisi Shawl—who dedicated her first novel, Everfair, to Octavia Butler—wrote to Butler, excerpted from Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2007, as soon after your fatal fall as I could bear to talk about you publicly, I organized a panel at WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention whose Guest of Honor you once were. The panel’s title was “Genre Tokenism Today: The New Octavia Butler.”

After the untimely death of the great writer Octavia E. Butler, some have asked who will take her place. A panel of African-descended women currently writing genre fiction addresses this question, talking about Octavia’s oeuvre and their own: similarities, differences, market forces, and the pressures to model their contributions to the field on hers. How many ways is this question just plain wrong? Who has a vested interest in there being “an Octavia,” new or old? What would a “new Octavia” look like? How does her literary legacy affect the field today, and how might it do so in the future? And how does this legacy relate to this disturbing question?

N. K. Jemisin, K. Tempest Bradford, Candra K. Gill, Nnedi Okorafor, and I started by telling our audience why each of us was in no way your replacement. Never could be. Never would want to.

But now, despite that, despite the endearment with which I opened this letter, it looks like we’re all going to have to be Octavias. All of us: women, and men, and every other gender as well; African Americans, Native Americans, and every other race—all of us. At least in this sense: we’re going to have to write change-the-world fiction, like you. We’re also going to have to bake change-the-world cookies and ride change-the-world horses and vote in change-the-world elections. We’re going to have to change the world. We’re going to have to do everything we can to maintain life on this planet.

We don’t have weapons but we do have numbers. And we have the memory of you, your pessimism and persistence. We have the path you were walking when you died.

Especially for science fiction authors of color, that path is easier to see now that you’ve walked it. Easier to see means easier to take. Also, taking it is way less lonely for people of color these days than it was when you first set out. As I said, we have numbers.

Janelle Monáe

The genre-bending musician and actress has cited Butler—who has, after all, been described as the Mother of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic and philosophy that Monáe has helped to popularize—multiple times as both personal favorite and creative inspiration. In 2010, she told i09:

[Butler’s] work was first of all brilliantly written, and Wild Seed was the book that inspired me. I loved the characters, and the morphing. [Anyanwu] was just such a transformative character, and I look at myself as a transformative artist. Just the fact that [Butler] defied race and gender . . . You appreciated her work for being a human being.

And in 2011, she told MTV that Butler had directly inspired her album The ArchAndroid:

I started reading Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. I love the character Doro in there. She reminded me a lot of myself. She had so many dimensions—we all do—and there’s so many sides of me.

More recently, she explained her take on science fiction to Stephen Colbert:

Well, it has started out dystopian, and, you know, I try and give hope through those dystopian worlds. But I love writers like Octavia Butler. She’s incredible, she’s a black woman, and I love that lens. Because I am a black woman and I grew up in the middle of America, I love writing through my truths, and through the lens of a black American woman, and I think movies like Black Panther have deeply inspired me. And Afrofuturism is a term that allows us as black people to see ourselves in the future and know that we make it, know that we’re not the first people gone when something goes down.

Tananarive Due

In a 2017 interview with Bitch, Due reminisced about her profound friendship with Butler, and the way her work has impacted both her reading and her life:

I knew her as someone who liked to laugh. [She] was very passionate about the world and trying to preserve it in every way she could think of and trying to warn us off our path of destruction with every book in a different way. I think that’s part of the reason why so many readers are embracing her now because more of us are consumed with the questions she was consumed with. I think the rest of us are just catching up with her and realizing how precarious our existence can be.

. . .

Honestly, it was literally Octavia’s Earthseed parables that got me past election day. The only lasting truth is change. Realizing that this is real, it’s cyclical, that we have to shake out of stupor and react. I couldn’t even process the election for days. It was almost as if it wasn’t real. It was a paralysis and Octavia helped me break out of that, through her words and her writing. For my own writing, it’s tough sometimes. I teach privately at two institutions, there’s Hollywood work from time to time, and I’ve been working on a novel for over three years. Sometimes writing makes me cry and the research makes me cry and it’s difficult, but fiction has a way of reaching people’s hearts in a way that the news can’t. It’s about empathy. That’s what works in fiction. The hope is that readers will be moved to some sort of action. Whether it’s educating people, donating to organizations, or calling a senator, but I hope that there’s something in everything that I write that will change a reader’s awareness of racial history and help spur them to create change. Maybe it’s [because I’m] the child of civil rights activists.

Sam J. Miller

The author of Blackfish City has, like many of the others on this list, mentioned Butler’s work as personally important and formative in numerous places. In a 2017 interview with Locus, he explained:

Even though I don’t write a ton of horror, I want to write about what scares me. That’s always been the thing that as a reader has excited me the most. I want to read about what scares me. I love Octavia Butler—she’s one of my favorite writers—because her work is about what scares me. It’s about the scary shit, and the scary shit is as much about racism and misogyny as it is evil body-hopping in the world. My way into fiction has always been through what I’m scared of.

adrienne maree brown

Much of brown’s work has engaged specifically with Butler’s—she discussed this and other things at length in a 2013 interview with Ada:

So many of the ways I look at the world were shaped by reading her work at a formative age so thinking about relationships as something that should be open and free rather than sort of locked into — you know, it’s only going to be this one way for all time. I think that that is multiple lovers or to choose not to have multiple lovers, but the idea that a relationship is not a place of ownership but a place of choice — she did so much presenting of that. I learned a lesson about writing that is this. Octavia’s work is not the most beautifully written work by any means and there’s a lot of writers I’ve read that have much more beautiful work or are more technically gifted writers and yet the ideas she was presenting were so genius and she was able to present them in such an accessible way that it didn’t matter that she didn’t write some kind of way. And I think for me as a writer that’s been a really important lesson: to go ahead and put my work out there and not worry about perfection so much as being honest and feeling like if there’s wisdom coming I need to let it flow through me and I feel like I’ve really learned a lot about what leadership looks like.

N. K. Jemisin

In 2008, on Butler’s birthday, Jemisin included the following tribute on her blog:

[I]f she hadn’t become a writer, I’m not sure I would be writing today. It would’ve been all too easy to give in to the little voices in the back of my mind, or the not-so-little voices from doubters among my loved ones, who insisted that my dream was unrealistic at best, laughable at worst. She was my clarion call—the lonely beacon in the wilderness letting me know that I was on the right track, that someone had been along the path before me, and that it was possible to reach the end.

So—thanks, Ms. Butler. If memory is the only true immortality, then may you live forever.

But Jemisin has also been clear that Butler was not a literary influence, but a career one—an important distinction. Again, on her blog, in 2011, she wrote:

In almost every interview, I get asked how I feel about Octavia Butler—even when I don’t mention her as a literary influence. (She’s not, ya’ll. She’s a career influence; knowing she made it in this business made me realize I could do the same. But in terms of her subject matter and writing style? No.)

#octavia estelle butler #octavia e. butler #octavia e butler #octavia butler #rip #happy birthday #wild seed #earthseed #doro #anyanwu

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epchapman89 · 5 years

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The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland

Coorie (ku:ri) is the Scottish art of living happy. It used to mean something akin to snuggle—coorie in, coorie down—but in the last couple of years it’s developed into a style of aesthetics and living. It’s not just about candles and coffee. Coorie is about taking comfort and energy from both the wild landscapes of Scotland and the cheerful interiors that inspire cozy togetherness. You might have experienced something like coorie if you’ve ever walked into your best friend’s living room or your favorite coffee shop and immediately felt welcomed and loved.

While traveling around Scotland last fall, I searched high and low for the best coffee I could find, the places that made us want to coorie down with loved ones, a book, and coffee. The local coffee haven is Edinburgh. Here, coffee shops sprout up like mushrooms after a good rain. In the center of the city, it’s unlikely you’ll walk a block without spotting at least one. In the last few years, the local scene has begun shifting more towards specialty coffee with a focus on top quality and good service. We’ve rounded up our top eleven coorie shops to help you get around the city without getting caught in the rain.

This guide is meant to be used in conjunction with Edinburgh cafes previously featured on Sprudge.

Artisan Roast

Artisan Roast is a welcoming, homey spot that feels worlds away from the central tourists hubs of Edinburgh. Here the roasters care deeply about their coffee, and tucked among plants, art, and knick-knacks are colorful flavor wheels and descriptions of the current coffees they’re roasting. Bags of coffee are displayed prominently and the bar is visually open, inviting everyone into the space.

When I visited Artisan, customers from the neighborhood and tourists from all over were making themselves at home in the front tables by the picture window and their comfortable back living room-style sitting area. When you visit, look closely at your surroundings, because hidden among the usual coffee shop trappings and home-like decor is a collection of funky wall art, a gold-framed photo of Morgan Freeman who reminds everyone to hydrate, and a cheeky promise “from” JK Rowling to never write there.

Artisan Roast has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Baba Budan

Baba Budan has the kind of bubbly atmosphere that comes from baristas who are having fun behind the bar. The space is cheery too: high ceilings, sleek wood, and skinny lights pair well with their coffee to brighten up even the darkest winter afternoon. Named for the 16th century Sufi saint who is said to have introduced coffee to India, Baba Budan is a continued celebration of the spread of that beverage. The community table is a good space to work, and the whole cafe is a great place to meet up with a friend. The baristas were brewing up a Salvadoran coffee from Girls Who Grind on drip, along with espresso from Workshop. Rotating roasters include Square Mile, The Barn, Coffee Collective, and Dark Arts Coffee. If you’re feeling a little jittery from caffeine already, they have a selection of food using seasonal ingredients. It’s all made in-house.

Baba Budan is located at Arch 12, 17 East Market Street, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Black Medicine

If you’re trying to drink coffee in the cafe where JK Rowling first wrote Harry Potter, Black Medicine is the closest you’re going to get. It stands where Nicolson’s used to, which is where Rowling wrote most of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (Later books were written at Elephant House, but despite claims to be “the birthplace” of Potter, they didn’t open until Philosopher’s Stone was almost published.) Today, Black Medicine is a bustling coffee shop serving up good brews, bagels, and high energy. The baristas are an upbeat and friendly group, even when there’s a chaotic line. Their menu of milk-based drinks is reliably good, and espresso is served with a ginger cookie to make your coffee break just that bit more exciting. The bohemian decor and excitable environment is conducive to any creative who finds people-watching inspiring, and you’ll find writers camped out with laptops everywhere.

If you care about the environment (and don’t you?), you’ll be happy to know Black Medicine has experimented with using steel straws for cold drinks, has completely banned drinking from takeaway coffee cups inside, and offers a 10% discount if you bring your own mug.

Black Medicine is located at 2 Nicolson St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Brew Lab Coffee

True to its name, Brew Lab Coffee has an underground bunker laboratory feel that makes it a favorite of students. The rooms are laid out like a rabbit’s warren and packed full of young millennials writing, studying, and talking. There’s more exposed brick than you can shake a fist at, and the decor is focused on the scientific, including a menu that visually mimics the element squares of the periodic table. The focus here is on coffee: equipment is top of the line and the baristas are clearly extremely knowledgeable about the drinks they’re serving. Brewed coffee itself is not a rarity in Edinburgh, but the pour-over bar in central view for everyone is. Service includes drinks brought to the table (if you’ve found one) and friendly baristas. V60s are brewed into carafes and served on trays; flat whites show up with perfectly symmetrical rosettas.

Though it’s one of Edinburgh’s more spacious specialty cafes, popularity and proximity to the University of Edinburgh means finding a place to sit can be a challenge. If you can, try to snag one of the arm chairs at the back and settle in. When you’re done with caffeine for the day, Brew Lab also serves beer, wine, and cocktails.

Brew Lab Coffee is located at 6-8 S College St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cairngorm Coffee

Behind the bar in Cairngorm read the words “Coffee and grilled cheese.” Generous sandwiches are constructed by the staff, and the coziness of this childhood favorite meal perfectly matches the coziness of Cairngorm. The ceiling is hung with burlap coffee sacks, and the natural wood and forest color palette evokes the eastern Highlands mountain range it’s named for. A snowboard, a skateboard, and skis hang on the walls to bring mountain adventure inside, or you can pick up an AeroPress and bag of this micro-roaster’s coffee to take on your next outdoor escape. When I dropped by, Cairngorm’s baristas were brewing up an excellent selection of Five Elephant coffee and their own Central American selection. They served up what was, hands down, the best flat white I had in Edinburgh. Attention to service is in everything Cairngorm does: tea was served with a timer to ensure it wasn’t over-steeped, newspapers were available for reading, and tablets set into bar seating were available to browse their website.

Find Cairngorm by descending some stairs from the main level of Frederick Street. The small patio outside is aces when the weather is great, or cozy up inside.

Cairngorm Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Castello Coffee

Just a block off of the Princes Street Gardens and the main tram line, Castello Coffee waits to supply you with coffee and food to fuel up. The space is clean and bright, and framed art features prominently on the walls. Clearly named for Edinburgh Castle nearby, this shop serves up an Americano made with Allpress Espresso that’s fit for a monarch and delicious hot chocolates for everyone else. The breakfast and lunch soup options are great, as well. Friendly baristas are behind the bar and the bustling energy patrons bring in and out of the shop is the perfect pick-me-up to accompany the coffee when you need one.

If you’re out playing tourist or shopping nearby, Castello is a convenient and reliably good shop to drop in on. Grab a seat at the counter facing the window to watch people stream by in this busy neighborhood or enjoy their wide patio seating under umbrellas to protect you from the elements.

Castello Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cult Espresso

Tucked away on a small road close to the University of Edinburgh is wee gem Cult Espresso. This long narrow shop has a sapphire blue facade that makes it stand brightly out from the rest of the store fronts on the street, and the front door promises coffee, brunch, and good times—indeed, the service is amazing and the energy in the shop is cheerful and welcoming. When I visited I had a delicious long black and a good long chat with the baristas about the coffee scenes in the US and Scotland, what makes Cult special, and how excited they were about the coffee they were serving that day. As a group of self-proclaimed “coffee nerds,” Cult is constantly curating seasonal single-origin coffees from the UK and Europe, and they’re truly dedicated to making sure each cup is delicious.

Cult Espresso may not be an actual cult, but I could come to be (almost) as dedicated to it as a real one. Drop by the shop for their ritual brunch and coffee combo, and don’t forget to snag some of their branded swag on the way out.

Cult Espresso is located at 104 Buccleuch St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Fortitude Coffee

More than any other, Fortitude Coffee feels like a barista’s coffee shop. It retains the appearance of a converted rowhouse and is a peaceful background for great coffee, friendly baristas, and a community vibe. I sat by the windows and enjoyed a juicy pour-over roasted by Fortitude and perused the simple food menu. When I visited, they were quick to talk up the other coffee shops on the Disloyal 7 card, as well as recommend other must-try places around Edinburgh. They host the occasional cupping with their full lineup of coffees, and recently co-hosted a Meet the Roaster event with Edinburgh Coffee Society, so if you’re just visiting, check with the baristas to see if there’s an event coming up. Though still a relatively young scene, Fortitude is proof of how great a city’s coffee network becomes when everyone in it cares about the same main goals: delicious beverages and open community.

On a busy day, Fortitude is the perfect tranquil spot to relax, chat about coffee, and grab a bite to eat. Their full wall of retail coffee and coffee equipment is a great source for whatever your coffee-loving heart needs.

Fortitude Coffee is located at 3C York Pl, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Lowdown

Literally low—down a flight of stairs—Lowdown is a minimalist shop. It’s a peaceful place to get away from the bustle of the main road, and has an airy feel to the decor and art. If you’re looking for a quieter place than Black Medicine to get work done, Lowdown is going to be your best bet for a distraction-free environment—the baristas are focused on careful, precise brewing. The coffee served and sold at Lowdown comes from all over Europe, including the delicious balanced shot of Ethiopian coffee from Colonna that was on drank when I stopped by. Similar to Artisan, Lowdown’s espresso bar is open and visible to guests, which invites an easy engagement that the baristas welcome.

The pastry case was full of beautiful pastries, including several cake options that are always the perfect pairing with any coffee for a good mid-morning snack. Bring a friend to take a break from shopping or sightseeing, or hunker down here with a good book. Lowdown is the perfect place to pass an afternoon with a cup of coffee.

Lowdown is located at 40 George St, Edinburgh. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

Machina

The coffee aesthetic is strong with this one. Above the bar hangs a black metal industrial light fixture from which a portafilter, a pitcher, and other various coffee implements hang from to float over the space. The walls are clean and white, and the tables are modernist sturdy wood and black metal. In Machina, several shelves are dedicated to different retail options; if you’re looking for equipment Machina seems to have the largest selection in Edinburgh. Located just up the street from Filament, this micro-roaster’s shop is another warm and relaxing space to escape rush hour or a quick rain shower.

Drop by early to enjoy the food menu options and sign up for their coffee subscription service while you’re there. Try to snag the window seat—not only is it super comfortable, it’s the perfect setting for your next Instagram photo with coffee.

Machina has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Valorie Clark (@TheValorieClark) is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. Read more Valorie Clark on Sprudge.

The post The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland appeared first on Sprudge.

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ava-candide · 6 years

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Aidan Turner is at present melting the nation’s collective heart as Captain Ross Poldark. But in his latest role, in a revival of Martin McDonagh’s controversial 2001 play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, he plays Mad Padraic, a vocal member of the Irish National Liberation Army and a man considered too unhinged for the IRA.

And Michael Grandage, who is directing the new West End production, is not stinting on the visceral horror. “We are doing what’s on the page,” he tells me, backstage at the Noel Coward Theatre. “When they’re dismembering bodies, they’re dismembering bodies, and when they’re shooting people in the head, they’re shooting people in the head. Anything in Martin’s play that caused offence last time we are not doing anything about because we are living in a different time.”

McDonagh, one of Ireland’s greatest living writers, lauded for such stage work as Hangmen and The Pillowman, and films such as In Bruges and the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is known for a dark, some might say sick, humour. Jokes about the IRA are, of course, always likely to draw an intake of breath, but Grandage believes the black comedy is necessary.

“I wouldn’t want to see a play that is this violent as a serious drama. It would not make for good theatre, and Martin understands that,” says Grandage. “You can’t stick a load of people on stage killing themselves and go, ‘Get it? It’s about terrorism, it’s about violence. Thank you and goodnight’. You need to see it through the prism of something else in order to realise the magnitude of what he’s trying to say.”

Turner, who has joined Grandage backstage and whose famous physique is hidden underneath a loose-fitting hoodie, understands the territory. He was born in the Republic of Ireland but has frequently travelled to the north, where he has a lot of friends.

“The world they live in is very different,” he says. “The way people treat each other and talk to each other, and the way violence is treated and accepted at a certain level – it can be quite shocking. The dialogue we all had with each other made it quite normalised. Martin shows that.”

To take an example from The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Mairead, a woman who manages to infiltrate the terrorists’ boys club and, eventually, falls in love with Mad Padraic, is advised by her mother: “Good luck, and try not to blow up any kids.”

“I guess that is what happens with decades of violence – you become desensitised to it,” says Turner. “There’s the daily grind of what that involves – whether it’s avoiding certain areas, ‘Don’t drive down the Falls Road at a certain time’ or ‘Don’t speak to that group of people’. Those things really matter.”

The play is set in 1993, when the Good Friday Agreement was still five years away and the Northern Ireland Peace Process was making small and erratic inroads. Turner was 10 at the time and, as a champion ballroom dancer, made frequent trips across the border.

“I was up there once a month for dancing lessons or for workshops or competitions. I remember going quickly from Loyalist to Nationalist areas and was very conscious of the changes. You would know because the pavements would be painted green, white and orange and there would be IRA flags and whatnot. Then you would see the Union Jack and murals of the Queen.

“Although I didn’t see any actual violence, there was definitely an underbelly, a different feeling.” Grandage believes the play’s reputation has become cemented in the years since it was written and that, if anything, it has gained more relevance, despite the official end of the Troubles.

“It makes us understand the banality of terrorism. Since Martin wrote it, we’ve had 9/11, we’ve had people hiring white vans and mounting pavements and mowing people down. Violence has taken on many different forms.”

I wonder if the play’s preoccupation with senseless killing can be linked to the current knife crime epidemic. Grandage believes this is part of McDonagh’s genius, that he has a gift for seeking out corners of society that aren’t necessarily talked about at the time.

Mad Padraic is extraordinarily violent, but Turner did not contemplate the idea of “playing evil” when he approached the part. “Padraic sees his struggle as a cause worth fighting for. When we first see him, he is in a warehouse in the middle of torturing a young lad for selling weed in a local school.

"He pulls out a couple of his toenails but he’s giving him good advice. He tells him he needs to go to hospital because his toes might go sceptic. He asks whether he has got the money to get there. He doesn’t see himself as a cruel person. So walking into a rehearsal room trying to play this idea of a bad person would derail it.”

I mention the recent backlash against McDonagh’s work, in particular Three Billboards… which faced accusations on social media of racism for the Damascene conversion of its vile sheriff character (played by Sam Rockwell). Does Grandage, as a director, worry that provocative writers will find themselves effectively neutered by the bleatings of over-sensitive snowflakes?

“Writers are among the bravest people I know. They want to go out and challenge us. I don’t see any evidence of them toning their voices down because of the world we now live in. Social media is not affecting them in the slightest.

“In fact, I think there is a bit of a “f--- you mentality that has emerged out of it.”

The role of Mad Padraic is, for Turner, just one of the joys of acting – allowing him the variation every performer craves. After this, he is back on Poldark, filming its fifth and final series (he brushes off those James Bond rumours – “yes, they keep spinning round, don’t they?”) and working on those pectoral muscles.

“I’m always ticking away on that. Intermittent fasting is good for energy levels, and those costumes are quite tight.”

His laid-back stance does, however, harden slightly when I mention the whole male objectivity issue. “I am sick of it now,” he says. “I’ve commented on it so many times. The more I talk, the more it snowballs.”

After the brilliant and abrasive Lieutenant of Inishmore opens, Turner may be thankful that people will be talking about him for other reasons.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore opens at the Noel Coward Theatre on July 4

#aidanpics #thelieutenantofinishmore

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matildainmotion · 7 years

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Mothers Who Make: The Unofficial Job Ad

Mothers Who Make are recruiting. You may have seen the job ad we put out for a producer. ‘We put out…’ - I always find the use of the 1st person plural uncomfortable in a context like this. It feels like a grand lie, because the truth is that it is just me, sitting here in a café with the baby asleep in her sling, on a Saturday, which is when I do my writing. It was while the baby was asleep that I wrote my proper job ad for MWM– I had never written one before. I had no idea how to do it and so I had to crib from another, roughly equivalent, job advert that Improbable’s Executive Director was kind enough to share with me. Since then, rather to my surprise (what did I think would happen?!) I have begun to receive very properly worded applications. They start with things like, “Dear Sir/ Madam” and end with, “Thank you for your kind consideration of my application.”

On the one hand I am glad to be going down this official route, glad to be accessing new networks by advertising the post properly, glad to be giving the position status. On the other hand the process runs counter to the very principles that underlie Mothers Who Make. I have written about this before but it strikes me with new force now: as a culture we polarise the personal and the professional, and the personal gets a bad name – it is ‘unprofessional,’ somewhat embarrassing or downright outrageous. Motherhood is hopelessly personal. It is messy and emotional – I was in tears only this morning because I am tired, my son was being difficult and I had run out of patience. I have a literature degree, a circus diploma, two M.A.s, several teaching qualifications but I have no qualifications for the work that is taking up most of my time, of being a mum, because they are my children and I did not have to train to get them. I had to do the far more awkward thing of falling in love, leading to that most intimate and unprofessional of all acts – sex. As I said, motherhood is hopelessly personal.

However more and more women are handing over their children to ‘professionals’ to do the caring, so that they themselves can maintain their professional identities. Mothers Who Make aims to challenge this strong cultural trend. We – and I do mean ‘we’ this time, because there are increasing numbers of groups being run across the UK – hold rare spaces to which women are welcomed and are valued as much for their mothering as for their making, as much for the nights they have spent helping a child back to sleep, as for the famous play in which they have performed at The National. I want “5 years spent in the role of full time mum” to be something any woman could be proud to put down on her CV, instead of it appearing like a worrying hole, a time in which she ‘dropped out.’ So I am simultaneously grateful for the applications I am receiving and disturbed by them.

Today then, to counter the proper job ad, I thought I would write this. This is the unofficial job ad. This is the lonely hearts/ lonely arts ad because it feels like that – I am internet dating. I am looking for a partner to support me with MWM. In fact what I really want to write is not an advert at all – I am not trying to sell myself or MWM. I want to write you a letter.

When I turned 40 I vowed I would write more letters – I got a proper writing case, not professionally proper, but proper paper, a proper place for a pen, for addresses, stamps. I love letters because as a genre I think they can most wonderfully dismantle the great ‘professional versus personal’ divide of our times. They are by someone, a person – me – for someone, a person – you. They are personal. And yet there is a kind of formality that comes from the process of writing that feels not so much ‘professional’ as in someone wearing a suit, but as in someone with a profession – someone engaged in doing a thing they care about enough to sit down and write about it. Here then is a letter to you, whoever you are, the person I am looking for….

Richmond, London, 3rd Feb ‘18

Dear Ms Right,

I am calling you ‘Ms’ – I do not know whether you are married, single, in a civil partnership, broken-hearted, in love, gay or straight. I am however right now imagining that you are a woman or someone who identifies herself, more or less, as female. I did not put this on the proper job ad. I have already had some men apply – I applaud and welcome them. But right here and now I am thinking of you as female because MWM involves, in part, holding women-only spaces, for reasons I have written about elsewhere, and I would love for you to be able to come to our meetings. I hope that you are someone who would want to be there anyway.

The odd part about a proper job ad is that it requires you to tell me about yourself, but I feel it is only fair that you know at least as much about me. Let me start with the basics. I am small. I have short dark hair and brown eyes. I am 43. I have a tattoo of a snake on my left shoulder. I am married. Instead of sending over my CV I will simply give you a list of the main roles or identities I have assumed in my life, not in any strict chronological order. Here they are: daughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, student, teacher, collaborator, dancer, aerialist, actor, director, writer, facilitator, lover, wife, and, for the last 6 years, mother.

I have two children. They are 6 and 1. You will meet them. There is a point in a new romantic relationship when you are taken back to ‘meet the family.’ This usually happens a few weeks in, at least. I need to warn you that with me it will happen right away. When we first meet I am likely to have my daughter with me and I will breastfeed her through our discussion. She will be shy but glad to meet you. I may have my son with me too – he will be loud and rude, which is his way of being shy. He will probably refuse to tell you his real name and may sing, “I am the Walrus” from the Beatles to you too loudly. Or he may have chosen to be with his Granny, my mother, who you will also meet very soon – she is amazing. Mothers Who Make and all the work I have done since becoming a mother is entirely thanks to the support of my mother. So you see why I am passionate about mothers – in part because of my own, and the difference I know committed mothering can make.

You will also meet my husband, Phelim McDermott, though not for a while because this morning he left for New York for six weeks, to do a show there. He helped me to run the Mothers Who Make crowdfunding campaign before Xmas. He encouraged me to write this blog. He started Devoted and Disgruntled, the revolutionary Open Space events for the performing arts community, without which Mothers Who Make would also never have come into being.

What I am trying to tell you is that I take my family to work with me. I firmly believe there can be no single solution to the current ‘how-to-do-it-all’ crisis in which many new parents find themselves, but for me the ‘drop the kids off at a crèche/ nursery/ nanny’ model has never worked. They have come with me to meetings, rehearsals, shows, conferences and workshops. I have felt first hand the shame of it, of being ‘unprofessional’ by bringing them along, as well as the radical pride – because it is possible.

I was recently asked what my workdays are, and I did not know what to say. It was a perfectly valid question that comes from the ‘normal’ world – the one that labels roles as professional or personal and calls one work and the other not. I do not have any workdays and every day is a workday. I work weekends. I work evenings. I work nights too. All day long, every day I am working on my mothering and my making. This means I am both highly organised and extremely disorganised. The house is a mess. I struggle to get the laundry done, the hoovering, the dishes. I try to do most of my emailing at weekends – it means you may have to wait a week to hear from me but you will hear. I can hold onto the thread of a conversation for a long time and whilst many other things interrupt it. Did I warn you that we will be interrupted? The children will do this but we will still get the work done. I promise you it is possible and if you do not like the sound of this then that is good. I am trying to scare you away. If you are still interested by the end, then this job is for you.

What else? I should probably explain that I never intended to found a national network. MWM is a response to a need. I started a small local group and it grew. Like any mother I am making it up as I go along. I am growing new skills along the way – that is what mothers do: we do what you can, we do what the next part of the job seems to require, we often feel out of our depth. I feel this right now with MWM, which is why I am seeking your help.

Let me tell you my strengths and my weaknesses. I am an artist – I like making things up. I like writing things. I like listening to people’s stories and sharing my own. I like asking questions. I care deeply and that makes me reliable: I will respond; I will turn up; I will make stuff happen. I am not however very good at numbers. Budgets scare me. I leave bank statements unopened for weeks. I am not good at sleeping either. I get over tired, overwhelmed. I am not good at spending too much time on a computer - it exacerbates the insomnia.

||| So what would I like from you? You do not have to be a mother, but it would make sense if you are. I would like you to be good at some of the things I am not good at – budgets, planning, evaluations, emails, the ‘professional’ stuff. But under it all, at the end of the day, through most the night, it comes down to the personal, it comes down to love, to the old meaning of the word ‘professional’ – what you profess to do, what you care about. I want you to care about the things I care about. I do not however want this work ever to get in the way of your caring work – of whoever is in your care. Please put them first. Then do the rest, and let it be work that you love.

If you love the sound of all this then please be my Valentine. Send me your application by Feb 16th, or before. You can send me your C.V. but you can also write me a letter. I asked for this in the proper job ad too – a covering letter. Let it cover whatever you want me to know about you. And if by any chance you missed the official job ad, you can find it here: http://www.improbable.co.uk/motherswhomake/

Thank you for reading my covering letter to you.

Yours sincerely professional, faithfully personal and radically questioning, Matilda

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baileymarie1793 · 6 years

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A decade’s worth of sports passion

I am not an athlete, but I have a passion for sports.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not uncoordinated or unknowledgeable. I tried my hand at rec-league basketball as a young kid, but it was too aggressive for my taste.

I played six years of softball, but I was a terrible hitter and an average fielder. Frankly, the team I was a part of was quite average too.

I was always a great runner and made the varsity cross country team as a freshman in high school. I ran enough to get my letter and then called it quits after multiple bouts of pulled hip flexors.

However, I always enjoyed football and basketball as an avid spectator and later reporter.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a small, southern town - the kind of town that nearly closes up shop for Friday night lights each fall. I grew up thinking it was normal to see the home team’s newspaper clippings plastered in downtown business windows and fans and families flock to watch the homecoming parade and following bonfire.

I remember learning the names of local high school football and basketball stars long before learning the names of college or professional athletes.

I remember my dad dragging me to as many home games as he could, even if that meant me coming armed with coloring books to keep me occupied in the metal and wooden bleachers.

All of that later translated to an insatiable love of high school athletics.

When I was 14 years old, I interned at my local newspaper. My beat: the life of a cross country runner.

By 15 years old, I was connected with a local TV station in their up-and-coming “hot shots” program. I was sent to the high school football sidelines armed with a small, Canon, point-and-shoot video camera; a monopod and my dad as my personal bodyguard.

The program was intended to give local kids interested in TV the chance to shoot their own sports while also providing free game coverage for the station. Instead, it became a career-changing calling.

I became a staple on the sidelines ever since.

After football, I requested basketball. Following a season of that, I added lacrosse to the mix as my high school started up their first-ever program.

Between 2009 and 2012, I never missed a single football game - home or away. I traveled to back-to-back state championship appearances. I cried on my final game. The head coach awarded me an honorary varsity football letter and a plaque that hangs on my wall to this day.

I knew, heading into college, that I wanted to pursue sports reporting. I set my sights to be an on-air sports reporter, potentially on the sidelines for ESPN.

As a freshman, a journalism professor sought me out to become a part of the school’s up-and-coming sports newscast. I was no stranger to new programs and happily jumped on board. However, I quickly became forced into the background behind seniors who already knew the hands-on producing skills that first-year me did not.

Sure, I could shoot. I nabbed college soccer and tennis highlights which aired in the first sports newscasts. I met Woody Durham. I interviewed Hall of Fame coaches. However, the instruction I yearned in script-writing and Final Cut Pro was never passed on no matter how many questions I asked on Sunday afternoons locked in the journalism school basement. I felt continually out-of-touch and in the dark.

I stuck with it for a semester because I had always been taught to carry out my commitments. At the end of that time, our group was granted an in-person meeting with the then-president of ESPN, John Skipper.

I was the only female freshman, and one of only a half-dozen females in the entire sportscast team, but I didn’t give that much thought at the time.

I remember filing into the conference room with all the rest of the group as John Skipper sat at the head of the table. He circled around the room, asking each of us our name, favorite teams and one question for him.

I was roughly half-way through the group, situated almost directly opposite of him. When it finally came to my turn, I asked him my one yearning question: “when will you have a female anchor lead Sports Center or eventually lead Super Bowl coverage?”

I will never forget his response: a laugh. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. He then added a shameless plug about the rise of ESPN-W.

I was completely deflated. I was mortified that I appeared like a fool, judging by his laugh. I was angry no one else in the room seemed appalled by the response. I was hurt that something I had wanted to see or even possibly achieved had been so whole-heartedly shut down.

The next day I chose to no longer pursue the sports track in the journalism school. I also vowed to never work for ESPN.

I took the rest of the year and summer off from sports and refocused my career path toward news. I still had a strong love for journalism (and still do), but sports would be moved to the backseat.

I kept up with my home teams from afar - even tuning in to the high school football radio broadcasts from time to time. I didn’t return to the sidelines, though, until I got a phone call from my old TV station.

They offered me a paid gig: help shoot Friday night football part-time. I hesitantly agreed.

My former mentor turned boss showed me the ropes on a professional-style camera. I learned Edius editing software, how to write up the shot sheets and input the scripts in ENPS. I was a rising junior in college doing exactly what college freshman me wanted to do, except I was doing it in a real station instead of a school-based studio.

I once again gave up my Friday nights. Sure, I missed my sorority’s cocktails, but I had returned to the sidelines.

That first night back on the turf, I felt like I was home. I wasn’t even at my high school, but I was comfortable anyway. I bounced around one of the 63-area high schools the station covered. I made friends and encountered old acquaintances from other stations from my previous years.

I was by far the youngest person, as well as the only girl, in the entire area shooting high school football for TV. My station was lucky enough to have a female sports anchor who I was privileged to work with often, though she didn’t usually shoot her own highlights.

Despite being the obvious woman in a man’s field, my colleagues and co-workers never doubted my knowledge or ability. I had some strange looks and sideways glances, sure. I had some high-school-boy catcalls more times that I’d like to count. But once kickoff happened, nothing else mattered.

The station kept me on for basketball season and renewed me the following year for both seasons.

As my confidence grew, I began to reconsider the idea of sports reporting. In February of my senior year, I took a leap of faith and attended an ESPN-sponsored sports reporting workshop in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ironically compared to my last ESPN close-encounter, the workshop was filled with aspiring female sports talent. (You can read more about my big takeaways in my previous post here.)

It renewed my faith a bit in my former dream, but it still left me with some harsh realities. So, I moved forward with news journalism as my focus, but I kept sports close at hand.

Out of college, I returned to my former station as a full-time videographer. I covered a little bit of everything: breaking news, college athletics, election coverage, and so on.

For multiple reasons, I was burnt out after a year. The passion I’d had during “Friday Football Fever” seasons didn’t translate to the day-to-day job. I found myself having more bad days than good, more and more often. I can vividly recount days on the job I called home in tears. College doesn’t prepare you for that.

I took another job, another shift in my fluxing career: a multimedia journalist for my hometown newspaper. I returned to the same place that 14-year-old me wrote her first sports beat.

I was hired in late May and began in mid-June, just outside local sports seasons. After a couple months of writing under my belt, I requested to cover the upcoming football season - the same team I grew up watching as a child, the same team I immersed myself into the sidelines with during high school. My boss agreed, seeing his Friday nights suddenly freed up after many more years of coverage than I had seen.

I also requested to video the season. He said it was fine as long as the articles got written. I grabbed my personal camera gear - and my dad, for old time’s sake - and returned to the first sidelines I had ever known.

The video work came easy. I doubled down and began to live-tweet the games as the action took place too. I soon gained a local following.

The articles took a tad more work at the start. I felt like a complete poser at first... Although I could speak and shoot a game recap with ease, I felt like I sounded out of place once pen went to paper. Why would anyone want to read a 20-something female’s play-by-play when a man who’s written sports for longer than I existed had probably already done it better, gotten it posted, and didn’t think twice about it before breakfast?

I got in the habit of speaking my recap before writing it. I used my tweets to string together the action. As I became more confident, I added game stats to my articles (though I still felt like a poser when I did so).

Eventually, the words came easier. I stopped writing them from speech and wrote them like normal.

Toward the end of the season, I remember walking into the office one day to hear an older citizen reading my football piece aloud in the lobby. I ducked my head and made a bee-line for my office. “Who wrote this article,” the man demanded.

“Our staff writer, Bailey Pennington,” our office manager politely replied.

I froze.

The older man curtly said, “tell him he did a good job. The boys sound like they’re on the right track.” He folded the paper under his arm and left.

My face flushed. I wasn’t angry I had been mistaken for a male writer. Rather, I had proven I was just as good. I belonged at the table that John Skipper had laughed me away from, and not just because I could shoot video.

In the year and a half since that moment, I have unashamedly and relentlessly covered the newspaper’s sports. I became a staple, video or still camera in hand, on the basketball court, behind the softball dugout, on the lacrosse sidelines, beside the swimming lanes and at the cross country finish lines.

I easily spend 20 hours a week at high school games on top of my regular work week, now ten years removed from the first time I filmed a game. Win or lose, I wait outside locker rooms for coach interviews (they all know me by name, most have my cell number too). My highlight videos are viewed and shared hundreds, sometimes thousands, of times on social media. People in the community stop me and thank me for my coverage more times than I can remember.

For all of these things, I have become extremely grateful. I realized my former dream of an ESPN gig wasn’t my path... Instead, I learned my value on a high school sideline by the impact it’s had on the dozens of athletes and fans in my small hometown. I came full circle.

Now, I’m two weeks away from another shift in my journalistic career... and I can’t help but reflect on my decade’s worth of sports passion.

At 25 years old, I’ve covered more sports in photos, video and articles than many budding sports-hopefuls could dream of by this age.

I’ve covered stages as big as the Carolina-Duke basketball rivalry to arenas as small as a 9:00 AM post-holiday high school basketball game (no joke, there might have been two dozen people in attendance).

Now, my career is taking me away from home and away from sports. I’ll be traveling, producing magazine and web content and helping oversee a team of creatives marketing for a big-name brand.

I’m thrilled for the opportunity. I'm excited for the challenge. I’m eager for the journey. But it’s bittersweet... with the majority of tears being shed for those same sidelines.

Sports is my passion.

I’m not an athlete. I’m not a coach. I’m not a man starting a Twitter feud or Facebook comment war, arming my arguments with stats and name-drops to prove “my sports knowledge is bigger than yours.” But I will happily argue with all of them that my passion is greater.

Even as I’ve written this long-form post/rant, I’ve shed a few tears.

I’ve notified many of the coaches I’ve covered over the years personally. All of them have been overjoyed for my new opportunities, although they’ve been sad to see me go. Most have expressed no surprise that I’m moving to bigger things, which I take as the highest compliment.

I haven’t had the heart to post it publicly until now... Most of my “followers” are expecting a basketball highlight video posted to Twitter by this time. But tonight I needed to reflect.

Although I’m moving away from sports once more, I know the sidelines will always be there. I’ve proved all I needed to prove to myself. I know my ability and so do the ones that matter most.

And I’m sure, with any luck, I’ll be back there once more with a camera in-hand.

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5questions · 8 years

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BELLA BRAVO

Bio: Bella Bravo was born in San Diego, CA in 1987. She is a writer living in Bloomington, IN.

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

Currently, I am converting my story “Public Figures” into a play. A couple of years ago I converted a very short segment of text, which was mostly dialogue of a pizza delivery person recounting a strange experience, into a skit. A friend also wrote a skit from a story of his, and we performed them in a rec room at community center, so the audience was sitting and standing among the actors. The whole experience was so fun. Then, earlier this year, I adapted another story into a longer, one-act production, adding props, lighting and sound effects, and multiple sets.

This creative process gives me a second way into the story, like a back door, because the actors help workshop the script. They ask questions about the characters’ lives, and so I get to tell them things that didn’t make the final cut of the story. They improvise phrasing, so the lines sound how they imagine the characters speak. It’s so cool to see them embody these characters that have been living with me (in my head) for so long.

Writing is normally such a solitary practice for me, whereas this is a community effort in every way. This month I’ll start reading through the script with the performers (wonderful actors from a local troupe called Sitcom Theater) and the musician who is writing a score (Jon Meador of Saintseneca and Kleinerwasserbär). It’s rejuvenating to finish a story and then follow other people’s ideas as they extrapolate from it.

Your recent single story chapbook Public Figures, along with your past collection The Unpositioned Parts, put some of the focus on the fringes of society. It isn't like a lot of the world of mainstream fiction, especially in this manner. What books or experiences influenced your development of this kind of focus in your work?

I feel like by fringe, maybe you mean, what my grandma would call “open.”[1] My grandma always says, “It’s important to be open.” Her gesture for that axiom is bringing her fingers softly to the corners of her eyes and guiding her hands out as though demonstrating nearly 180 degree vision, “open, not closed.” She has large brown eyes. I feel drawn to “openness”, spaces and experiences where I can have a wide outlook where the boundary is not closed. Let’s see examples of open experiences would be queerness, gratitude, crime, becoming, hope, communism. I guess I’m fine with opening boundaries as well. I write from experience, usually from a place or visual image stuck in my head. I think a sense of abandonment is a theme connecting many of those incidents or images. My family felt like an open container; I always felt exposed, a little to the side of their primary concerns. I tend to feel more at home or more confident in negative spaces or spaces that lack definition—absences. I think that’s where the focus on fringe or openness comes from.

Your prose has a heavy sense of control, with a strong feeling of power in the story and the kind of step-by-step way that sentences build up this huge staircase of words and narrative, where you end up really high and then you maybe fall off or make peace with being so high. Who are writers you really like for the craft of their prose? What really draws you in most to the works that you like the most?

For craft inspo, I read short-short fiction. Thrifty writers like Grace Paley, Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Donald Barthleme and Sophie Calle know how make the most of a syllable. I think of a given text as a closed economy. Its fundamental principle is circulation; stagnation is expiration. These writers experiment with different patterns to modulate the dynamism of a story, but every word, punctuation mark gives the story at hand energy.

I tend to rely on incremental escalation, like a staircase pattern, because that’s what I do in legal writing as well. In legal writing, I have a rule of one new fact per sentence, which gives the text a slow and consistent building momentum. It’s easy to control. (Humor often relies on this same incremental escalation, and I think all of the above artists write hilarious prose.)

I love also poetry for its excesses and gaps. When I read Bhanu Kapil and Anne Boyer I feel like there is so much that I don't understand. I love how they use poetics to expand the genres of memoir and social critique, blurring them into one another. I keep a copy of Ariana Reines’s Mercury on my nightstand. She harmonizes within the complexity of gender, existence and species, in some moments with five-word lines surrounded by a blank page. Her writing is intricate and strong like a healed burn.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you live in Indiana or did you just go to school there? What do you think about Indiana?

Let’s see, I sit a lot, ha. I’m a deputy public defender in Bloomington and I write, so much of my day passes seated behind my desk, in a courtroom or at my dining room table. In terms of the workday-to-workday, it’s my job to defend people from criminal penalty zealously. I have a complicated relationship to my work. For the most part, I defend indigent people against State prosecution. This is an easy position for me, because I don’t believe in prisons, police or the State. My job gets difficult emotionally when I know my client has hurt someone or when I can’t figure out a way to prevent a penalty that I think is particularly unfair. Many of my cases deal with the same conduct and circumstances, and that’s a consequence of the nature of criminal law, where the legislature has identified and proscribed specific behaviors. This pattern forces the facts of my clients’ lives to bleed together. I learn private details about my clients’ lives shortly after meeting them, but I try to respect the narrowness of my glimpses. I’m humbled by my job, because my clients have a lot of confidence in me from the very beginning. Fear and anxiety are excellent motivators for dependence and bonding. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, I feel grateful to be a public site for trust.

I moved from Salt Lake City, Utah to Bloomington to go to law school in 2009. Like 60 percent of Salt Lake County residents (approximate), I was raised in the Mormon Church. Many of my family are still practicing members, and it wasn’t until I left Utah and moved to Indiana that I realized how culturally isolated and cultish my childhood was. Shortly after I first moved here, I remember feeling shocked when I saw an undergrad, like a typical university student, smoking a cigarette on a public sidewalk. Salt Lake was such a sterile place, both physically and socially. To me in 2009, smoking was something weirdos and disestablishment folks do, not something for college kids. Indiana has become my archetype for the U.S., and that’s just because it’s my primary contrast to Utah, which is not representative of anywhere else. That estimate was validated unfortunately by the election. I don’t feel much affinity for Indiana at this point.

That said, Indiana has many wonderful people. Bloomington is a small commercial center for south-central Indiana. I’m lucky to live here with a group of compassionate and thoughtful social heretics who have been drawn to Bloomington for various reasons, some from other parts of Indiana, some from other parts of the U.S., and some from other parts of the world.

Fuck this Midwest humidity though. My body was meant for the desert.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all writing will change at least contextually, although all writing is also always changing contextually.

You make a good point that art is contextual. I think resonance comes from historical patterns as they repeat and shift over time. The election angers me because it demonstrates a resurgence of far-right populism in the West. These trends are so dangerous as they build momentum. America has always been racist, but now anti-immigrant and Blue Lives Matter sentiments are the rally cries of a fascist platform and that platform will be publicly-funded first-term agenda. Many of my family members are immigrants who have practiced—with varying degrees of predictability—cyclic migration, living in both aboard and the States. The father who raised me is a cop. My mom voted for Trump and Pence. Since the election, I’ve had dreams—at night and during the day—where I scream at the top of my lungs in my mom’s kitchen and all nine of her small dogs mill around my feet. I think anger and absurdity will resonate over these next 8 years, lbh. I’m selfishly excited for a resurgence of punk.

Though, I think climate change will have a greater impact on my work and experiences over the next decade. Having an immediate environmental catastrophe will make explaining what I’m doing—writing, touring, gardening, developing relationships with many levels of intimacy—and not doing with my life—having kids, marriage, and a path to salvation—easier when I visit my mom. Last Christmas, she asked me when I think I’ll have kids, so I brought up an article about millennials are mostly having children out of wedlock. Over the next few years, higher energy storms will cause greater levels of damage to the coasts, fresh water will become a scarcer commodity, and both will cause higher prices at Costco, so I feel like we’ll mostly talk about that instead.

[1] They have complementary definitions: “of an outer edge; margin; periphery,” and “allowing access, passage; not closed or blocked up.”

#bella bravo #monster house press #costco #christmas #anti-fascism #fascism #midwest #bloomington #grace paley #italo calvino #andrew duncan worthington

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limejuicer1862 · 5 years

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Liz Brownlee

is a National Poetry Day Ambassador, A School Patron of Reading, and does readings and workshops in schools, performs at literary festivals and libraries etc., and organises poetry events.

Her other books are Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, Liz Brownlee, Jan Dean and Michaela Morgan, Macmillan, The Same inside, Poems About Empathy and Friendship, Liz Brownlee, Matt Goodfellow and Roger Stevens, Macmillan, Apes to Zebras, An A-Z of Animal Shape Poems, Liz Brownlee, Sue Hardy-Dawson and Roger Stevens, Bloomsbury, and Be the Change, Liz Brownlee, Matt Goodfellow, and Roger Stevens, Macmillan.

[email protected]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

I’d been writing stories for my local primary school, and a friend suggested I should go on a writing course. I can’t drive, and when some time later she said she had to go on a creative writing course and would I like to go with her, I accepted. Then, when someone else we got to know there turned out to live near enough to give me a lift, she dropped out. Her creative writing enthusiasm was really a ruse to get me there (I have some very good friends).

The (luckily) excellent tutor said the first thing I wrote showed I was a poet. Subsequent writing did seem to confirm this, and I enjoyed it. I wrote my first children’s poem there about my son, who stuffed his pockets full of all sorts of things, which ended up in the washing machine.

Then the second friend asked me if I’d like to accompany her to Bath Uni for a course and gave me the list of courses to choose from. One was for children’s poets, run by children’s poet Mike Johnson, serendipitously on the same day and at the same time as the course she was doing. He sent off some of my course poems with his to poet anthologists and I was published (thanks, Mike!). In fact, that first poem I wrote was my second to be published. When my first poem was published, my mum gave me a box from her attic – it was called ‘Lizzy’s kiddy drawings and poems.’ I’d forgotten all about my earlier efforts!

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Poetry was everywhere when we were little. There were always children’s pages in all the newspapers, with puzzles, cartoons, crosswords and poems. My first poetry book was called Jolly Jingles, read to my brother and I often by my mum and dad, and I still have it. Children’s annuals always contained poetry – Treasure Annual introduced me to Edward Lear’s The Pobble, who drank lavender water tinged with pink, and who lost all his toes swimming in the Bristol Channel – very glamorous and slightly unsettling to a child who was born in Bristol. R L Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage was wonderful to charge around quoting – who could not fall in love with the rhythm of Faster than fairies, faster than witches/Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches! AND – my favourite poem read in childhood, Overheard on a Saltmarsh by Harold Munro, which still sends shivers up and down my arms.

At Grammar School, we had a wonderful English teacher (who is still alive), who read us delights to tingle spines and make us breathless, such as The Listeners by Walter De la Mare, and Tarantella by Hillaire Belloc. Other poets were introduced by the O and A Level curriculum.

3. What is your daily writing routine?

I get up. Have breakfast. Do some Tweeting and any blog work that needs done, and round about 11 when I have finally woken up after a coffee I start researching, or writing, depending what stage I’m at. It takes a while to get into the writing. Lots of false starts. Lots of deleting and starting again in a different form or style or pace or angle. If I’m deeply into a project of writing I will start that straight away and carry on, my husband comes home around 7, and I’m still at it, and I often continue through the evening, because once I have got going, I find it hard to stop. The final poem may not be the final poem. Sometimes it takes a few weeks or months of tweaking. Sometimes you just know that is it.

4. What motivates you to write?

Enjoyment.

5. What is your work ethic?

Write the truth.

6. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I loved animals and read a lot of animal books, Gerald Durrell, James Herriot, and lots of non-fiction facts about animals. I write a lot of animal poetry. But I also read a LOT of fiction, very eclectically, favourites being Aldous Huxley, Isaac Asimov, all Brontës, Jane Austen, John Wyndham, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, J R Tolkein, Stephen King, Harper Lee, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula Le Guin, Enid Blyton, J Meade Faulkner, Marjorie Rawlings (never read the Yearling again, too sad!) E Nesbitt, Alan Garner, C S Lewis … my parents did not censor anything. I made no distinction between adult or children’s books and read them both, and have done ever since. I think everything you read influences you and feeds into the rhythms in your mind that you can source to create.

7. Which writers do you admire the most and why?

I don’t admire anyone the most. How can you? People are so different, writers are so different, you read them all for different experiences. I can tell you my favourite books – To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee (we read this at school, and my teacher let me keep my copy as she could see I was having hard time handing it back!), Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut Jr The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall, Cancer Ward, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, The Chrysalids, John Wyndham, Helen Dunmore and Bill Bryson always, and anything by Paul Auster, Tim Winton and Raymond Chandler, those spare prose styles I find delicious, I Robot Isaac Asimov, oh, I can’t write them all – anything that makes me laugh.

Poets? Let’s just say I try and read everything I can get my hands on. Particular favourites, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda. Children’s poets? I read them ALL. Lots are my friends. I have my favourites but I’m not saying.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

My brain flits. Poetry fits the flits.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Read a lot. Write a lot. Go to a writing class. Never expect to finish learning how to write.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

My newest book, just out, is Be the Change, Poems to Help You Save the World. I was noticing and reading that children are worried about the continuous feed of worrying information about the climate crisis. They are powerless, and that makes them feel more scared. The poems in the book, which I’ve written with Matt Goodfellow and Roger Stevens, address most of the 17 UN sustainability goals, and each poem has little tips at the end, which give a child small ways of helping the climate themselves. Having something constructive to do helps with anxiety. And I believe that if we all pull together, we can save the world. Here is the last poem in the book:

Snow

Swirling slowly in lilting flight, as cold as stars, the soundless white

of drifting feathers spreading wings, to sing the songs that snowflakes sing,

of how small gifts of peace and light can change the world in just one night.

>© Liz Brownlee

I’ve also just handed in a book of shape poems about people who have shaped the world – this is an anthology and my first project as an editor. I thoroughly enjoyed this process!

I’m busy writing for another few books, but it’s too soon to mention those – but it is true that I am never happier than when ‘ping’ I suddenly ‘get’ how to shape the words I want into a poem, or how to shape the words I’ve already written into a shape poem, or when I’m shaping poems into a book.

12. Do you do anything other than write children’s poetry?

I used to draw a lot. If I’m not writing I have strong urges to do something else creative – draw, sew, make something! But if I’m not writing, and even when I am writing, I run several websites and Twitter accounts. I have my own blog which I add to fairly often (http://www,lizbrownleepoet.com), and Poetry Roundabout (http://www.poetryroundabout.com), a website on which I post anything and everything to do with children’s poetry, there is an A-Z of current children’s poets, I’m doing a series of famous children’s poets and their favourite children’s poetry books at the minute, and I also post reviews, information for poets and people who love poetry, poetry news and competitions etc. I believe supporting children’s poets and poetry helps us all. Then there’s my Twitter – https://twitter.com/Lizpoet I also post the blogs on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog (https://childrenspoetrysummit.com/) and run that Twitter account, https://twitter.com/kidspoetsummit And last but not least, I walk my assistance dog, Lola.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Liz Brownlee Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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michaelfallcon · 5 years

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The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland

This guide is meant to be used in conjunction with Edinburgh cafes previously featured on Sprudge.

Artisan Roast

Artisan Roast has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Baba Budan

Baba Budan is located at Arch 12, 17 East Market Street, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Black Medicine

Black Medicine is located at 2 Nicolson St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Brew Lab Coffee

Brew Lab Coffee is located at 6-8 S College St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cairngorm Coffee

Find Cairngorm by descending some stairs from the main level of Frederick Street. The small patio outside is aces when the weather is great, or cozy up inside.

Cairngorm Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Castello Coffee

Castello Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cult Espresso

Cult Espresso is located at 104 Buccleuch St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Fortitude Coffee

Fortitude Coffee is located at 3C York Pl, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Lowdown

Lowdown is located at 40 George St, Edinburgh. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

Machina

Machina has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Valorie Clark (@TheValorieClark) is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. Read more Valorie Clark on Sprudge.

The post The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland appeared first on Sprudge.

The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

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mrwilliamcharley · 5 years

Text

The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland

This guide is meant to be used in conjunction with Edinburgh cafes previously featured on Sprudge.

Artisan Roast

Artisan Roast has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Baba Budan

Baba Budan is located at Arch 12, 17 East Market Street, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Black Medicine

Black Medicine is located at 2 Nicolson St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Brew Lab Coffee

Brew Lab Coffee is located at 6-8 S College St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cairngorm Coffee

Find Cairngorm by descending some stairs from the main level of Frederick Street. The small patio outside is aces when the weather is great, or cozy up inside.

Cairngorm Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Castello Coffee

Castello Coffee has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Cult Espresso

Cult Espresso is located at 104 Buccleuch St, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Fortitude Coffee

Fortitude Coffee is located at 3C York Pl, Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Lowdown

Lowdown is located at 40 George St, Edinburgh. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

Machina

Machina has multiple locations in Edinburgh. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Valorie Clark (@TheValorieClark) is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. Read more Valorie Clark on Sprudge.

The post The Sprudge Guide To Edinburgh, Scotland appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge http://bit.ly/2I6T0Qx

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thegloober · 6 years

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A Bread Factory, Part One: For the Sake of Gold

[Editor’s Note: This is a review of Part One of “A Bread Factory,” a matched set of films about an arts center’s effect on a small town in upstate New York, written and directed by Patrick Wang (“In the Family“). Although each part stands alone and can be enjoyed separately, they are meant to be seen together. For a review of Part Two, click here.]

Patrick Wang’s “A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold” is half of a matched set of movies that comprises the most original filmgoing experience of the year. Part Two is subtitled “Walk with Me a While.” Each runs two hours. The halves are meant to be shown back-to-back in a theater with an intermission, but you can watch them independently and come away feeling that you’ve seen a complete work. Any way you watch it, “A Bread Factory” is a wildly ambitious yet self-effacing epic about a place and its people, written, directed and acted in the spirit of Robert Altman (“Nashville“), Richard Linklater (“Bernie“) and Edward Yang (“Yi Yi“)—muralists who paint on wide canvases, yet still treat each character as individuals worthy of their own portraits.

Part One introduces the fictional upstate New York town of Checkford, a place as vivid as Grover’s Corners, Deadwood or Maycomb. The central location is the eponymous arts center, headquartered in a converted bread factory. For forty years the place has been run by its founders, Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and her partner Greta (Elizabeth Henry). Dorothea is a tough, passionate administrator and stage director who doesn’t suffer fools. Greta is a soft-spoken, reflective, Finland-born actress who tries to rein her partner in when she’s about to lose her cool.

That’s been happening more often recently. A bigger, glitzier arts facility just opened on the other side of Checkford. It serves up flamboyant and shallow work that’s steeped in 1990s conceptual art cliches, shuts the brain down instead of engaging it, and seems designed to pull in tourists and send them home with tote bags and t-shirts. Most of the work is produced or approved by a couple of gimmicky and very successful Chinese performance artists known as May Ray (Janet Hseih and George Young).

May Ray pipe prerecorded laughter and applause through public address systems to override the crowd’s responses. They dress in outrageous costumes, including a set of retro spacesuits with tiny action figure versions of themselves dangling in front of their faceplates. They are their own logos, branding all they touch. They like to draw the audience into cutesy stunts (like “walking in another person’s shoes,” which are fashioned from hats) that momentarily thrill or amuse, then serve up banalities disguised as wisdom (like “falling is a part of walking”) so that patrons go home knowing not only that they’ve seen Real Art, but what it was supposed to mean. This is a sharp contrast to The Bread Factory, which books some out-of-towners and the occasional big name, but is mainly fueled by local work that’s steeped in a classical liberal arts tradition, and created by local artists for local audiences in a relationship that’s more reciprocal and open-ended, an exchange of traditions and values.

Dorothea and Greta learn that the town is taking of cutting their educational subsidy— which lets them teach Chatford children and teenagers, thus training a new generations of artists and patrons, and provides the core of their monthly nut—and give to the newcomers, who overmatch them in every area except parking. Suddenly they have to think like tacticians, brainstorming a plan to convince a majority of the city council to leave things as they are.

The new facility’s administrator, Karl (Trevor St. John), is a formidable adversary. He presents himself as a calm, bland, middle manager-type, but he’s smart and ruthless. He’s the kind of guy who’ll reply to a journalist’s carefully researched questions by asking why she’s resorting to personal attacks. Karl has shady funding connections, and seems to have already bought off half the school board. He even tries to strong-arm Dorothea into backing down from the impending board fight by threatening to report The Bread Factory to the state for hiring a felon (albeit one whose conviction was reversed) and employing children (actually volunteers who are being thoughtfully mentored by the staff).

Dorothea and Greta’s strategizing and politicking is intercut with scenes of the couple workshopping a new production of the Greek tragedy “Hecuba,” directed by Dorothea, translated by a scholar named Elsa (Nana Victor) who shyly declines to call herself a writer, and co-starring Greta and a grand old English actor known as Sir Walter (the late, great Brian Murray, in his last performance).

Around this core group, Wang spins a constellation of supporting players. Some have stories that intersect with (and comment upon) the main action. Others get one juicy scene or bit, then recede into the chorus. An embittered indie filmmaker named Jordan (Janeane Garofalo) loathes the boring, predictable questions of adults (“What was your budget?”), but roars to life when guest-teaching young children. One of her pupils is so inspired by Jordan’s blistering rant about the importance of passion in art that he goes home and upbraids his own mother for not cooking chicken like she means it. A school union representative named Jason (James Marsters) is secretly comparing notes with a city council member named Mavis (Nan-Lyn Nelson) who happens to be his girlfriend. Sandra, a woman with an operatic voice (played by opera singer Martina Arroyo), loves to watch plays being rehearsed. She regales strangers with stories about her late husband, who wrote appliance manuals (“He told me, ‘Sandra, more people read me than Faulkner”).

The aforementioned journalist, Jan (Glynnis O’Connor), is also the local newspaper’s editor and only employee. She keeps the tradition of an independent Fourth Estate alive from a windowless basement office. Jan is currently mentoring a teenage intern named Max (Zachary Style), who’s in love with a local library assistant named Teresa (Jessica Pimintel), who’s also acting in “Hecuba,” a production that will eventually be reviewed by a retired Pulitzer-prizewinning critic and scholar named Jean-Marc (Philip Kerr), who’s been been getting the silent treatment from Sir Walter since he panned one of performances fifty years ago.

“A Bread Factory” is about a lot of things. One is the challenge of succeeding as an artist in a market economy when you have knowledge, enthusiasm, and the loyalty of a core audience, but no money or connections to speak of, and a stubborn determination to let the work speak for itself rather than constantly hyping it. The David and Goliath dynamic between the two facilities is reminiscent of the conflict between Italian restaurants in the classic American 1950s period comedy “Big Night.” One restaurant is run by a showboat who gives the people what they want: spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce, checkered tablecloths, accordion music, and sudden bursts of flame. The other restaurant specializes in Northern Italian food unfamiliar to 1950s Americans, cooked by a uncompromising chef who wants to give every diner a surprising and authentic experience, and would rather brood in his kitchen than put on a show. You can guess which place makes money.

Beyond that, “A Bread Factory” is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It’s about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you. A big part of Dorothea’s frustration—brilliantly communicated by Daly, in a performance that sums up everything that makes her such a treasure—comes from having to explain any of this in the first place. She’s old enough to remember when Americans of all social classes thought of art as a birthright, as integral to life in an advanced democracy as well-funded public schools.

A major subtext in all the scenes that involve Dorothea, Greta, Karl and May Ray is the way a capitalist economy encourages the public to think of all art as just another product, forcing independent creative artists to package and present themselves like rock-star entrepreneurs, even if they don’t have the temperament for it; and how the postwar tradition of publicly funded art and art education in America has withered in the last 30 years, to the point where many people hear the word “art” and think “decadence” or “indulgence” or “a thing that taxes shouldn’t fund.”

“You must have seen rough times before,” a board member tells Dorothea. “Honestly,” she says, “I’ve never seen it worse.” Her pessimism is independently echoed by Jean-Marc, who says of the arts facility, “They once baked bread here, but now we live in an age of crumbs. But what they make of these crumbs is miraculous, and we are lucky to have them.”

This is my favorite film of the year by far—and when I say “film,” singular, I’m referring to both halves of “A Bread Factory,” because they flow together in the mind. As of this writing, I’ve seen both parts three times. With each viewing, I notice new things and am more moved by the characters, who are unique and eccentric in the way that real people are, but written and acted with the economy and directness that distinguishes characters in well-constructed plays or short stories—ones where the storytellers know what they want to say and how best to say it.

Readers should know going in that this is not a film (or pair of films) that you can half-watch while looking at your phone. You have to give yourself over to the story, characters and atmosphere with an open mind and heart, and be a peace with the fact that the movie is going to throw you into the middle of scenes without immediately spelling out who everyone is, and what, exactly, you’re looking at. Wang takes his sweet time setting up a moment, and the punchlines in comedic scenes are as likely to be visual as verbal (as when the camera stays fixed on Jordan as she sits in a theater where her movie is about to be screened, asking the projectionist to run different parts of it to check the picture and sound; finally, the camera pans up to reveal that the projectionist is an eleven-year old boy).

To paraphrase a friend who’s a minister as well as a film buff, this is the kind of movie where Mohammed goes to the mountain, not the other way around. But the journey is worth it. This film is miraculous, and we are lucky to have it.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/a-bread-factory-part-one-for-the-sake-of-gold/

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char27martin · 7 years

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Finding an Agent & Approaching Artist Residencies

I’m determined. The Stupendous Adventures of Mighty Marty Hayes will soon rest on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and retail stores everywhere. Middle-grade fiction readers will delight in reading about a 12-year-old African-American superhero and his multi-cultural band of friends, along with their love of spy gadgets and science.

But first, I need an agent.

This guest post is by Lora Hyler . Hyler has completed the manuscript of her middle grade novel, The Stupendous Adventures of Mighty Marty Hayes, and has begun the second in the series while actively seeking an agent. She founded her Wisconsin-based public relations and marketing company in 2001. She will join the faculty for fall 2017 conferences of both SCBWI Wisconsin and Wisconsin Writer’s Association. She holds a 2016 Jade Ring award from the Wisconsin Writers Association for an adult short story, several screenwriting and news awards, and has published hundreds of corporate articles. She was the recipient of a 2017 artist residency at Marnay sur Seine, France and two previous residencies at Noepe Center for the Literary Arts on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

My writing journey began a couple of decades ago with a career in radio news, public relations, and marketing. I started my own public relations firm in 2001 (www.hylercommunications.com), have represented a handful of authors, and look forward to marketing my own books. Short stories and screenplays were my first forays into the world of fiction. Encouraged by a few screenwriting awards, I began to exercise my fiction writing muscle through a middle grade manuscript.

After joining the Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) in 2015, I learned much about the business of children books. Many times, the wealth of information on the path to publication appears daunting. Yet, there are plenty of authors willing to share their stories about how they landed an agent, sometimes after 100 or more rejections. I’ve chosen to view each “no” as a step closer toward “YES!” After all, that’s how I’ve run my career.

My tally sheet reveals I’ve sent queries to nearly 30 agents. To date, I’ve received 17 no-thanks, a couple requests for full manuscripts, and several encouraging words. My advice to any budding author: Face these rejections with the view of a glass half-full. If you’re like me, your eyes race across the email the minute it pops into your in box. Yep, there it is … the dreaded, all too familiar sentence. You know the one. It’s always some version of: “Thank you for sending your manuscript. It’s not a good fit for my current list.”

I had a recent chat with my critique partner and shared my story of a lovely rejection email from an industry leader. I successfully queried her and was told to send the full manuscript. During the discussion, I had a revelation. This industry leader wrote, “Thanks for sending me your manuscript which I have so enjoyed looking at. It is such a great fun concept and the ideas you have for further titles makes it a more commercial project than we (pursue).”

Great news! I was worried my concept wasn’t commercial enough. This individual has successfully shepherded through a fantasy series that set global sales records, captured the imaginations of youth and adults, and gained fans from reluctant and avid readers alike.

Infographic. Vision board. Visualize your way to success.

On my journey toward publication, I’ve decided to harness all the positivity the Universe sends my way. I’ve created an infographic of written quotes from agents and editors who have reviewed my work. With this lovely visual encouragement greeting me each day, I expect to keep my spirits up and forge ahead until the day an agent says the ultimate, “I’d love to represent you.”

Do go back and carefully read any rejection notes you’ve received. Wait! You want me to revisit the source of so much pain? Yes, I do! Occasionally, amidst the gray clouds, the skies part and a beam of light peeks out. Mine these rejection notes for bits of wisdom and any encouraging words.

Find an agent who’s best for you.

Where do you go to meet these agents? In person at workshops and conferences, or on websites and webinars. I’ve found agents that I’ve met face-to-face to be accessible. It also pays to listen closely when authors are speaking at conferences. I attended my local SCBWI conference where an author choked up while thanking his agent, saying she believed in him when he had stopped believing in himself. High praise! Due to his accolades, I queried this agent noting how impressed I was with her. She replied within an hour asking me to send my manuscript.

Try Twitter and the laundry list of pitch sessions available to budding authors. Brenda Drake leads Pitch Wars.

Another interesting concept allows you to get a handle on select agents and what they are currently seeking for their list. It’s called the Manuscript Wish List. I’ve found that tracking this provides insights into the whims of a particular agent.

While I seek an agent, I also keep an eye out for nonfiction work for hire opportunities to capitalize on my journalism background. I also like to blog. A sure way to keep writing muscles in good order.

The biggest literary agent database anywhere is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the most recent updated edition online at a discount.

Discover your tribe through residencies.

Now, I’d like to share an exciting part of my journey that I like to think of as a blindingly bright light directing me to the finish line. Artist residencies. They are available worldwide; some are for artists of all kinds, others are specifically for writers.

The joy of being selected for a residency provides a high to keep any writer powering through rejections, and revising. In our harried daily lives, where we struggle sometimes to find quiet time, residencies provide space and time to create. Often in beautiful, one-of-a-kind settings. My last residency set me up in a writing studio with windows opening up to the Seine river running through a small French village. Cool breezes, swooping birds, and the occasional family swimming downstream accompanied my writing days.

It’s fantastic to begin a residency living among strangers, and as the days progress, to become supporters of each other’s work and lives. Critique groups form and friendships blossom. Many residencies encourage public readings, providing writers an opportunity to reveal their work in progress, or completed work, to an eager audience. I’ve received adrenaline highs when an audience member laughs at the right spots. The cherry on top is one-on-one feedback offered post-reading.

My residencies to date:

May 2017: Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre, (CAMAC), Marnay sur Seine, France. Month-long residency at a 17th century complex in a village of 240 residents. I was one of eight selected artists from around the globe.

Fall 2016 and Fall 2015: Noepe Center for the Literary Arts, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Noepe has since closed its doors.

As you read this, I am applying for additional residencies. Spain, Italy, Mexico, Washington state, and Illinois residencies are just a few that have caught my eye. I encourage you to pursue the thrill of a blinking cursor before you in a fresh space, in a new state or country. You’ll be surrounded by like-minded souls who, a door or two over, work on their own creations. And they’ll be happy to join you in a laugh and sips of wine when you need a break.

However, wherever you decide to write, just keep writing. Publication is just a few no’s away. Until then, mine your rejections. In the midst of it all, there may be gold.

If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at [email protected].

The post Finding an Agent & Approaching Artist Residencies appeared first on WritersDigest.com.

from Writing Editor Blogs – WritersDigest.com http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/finding-agent-approaching-artist-residencies

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mavwrekmarketing · 7 years

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Image caption Jim Cartwright (centre) leading an exercise with one of his drama groups

From Dame Julie Walters to David Morrissey, many top show business names have voiced concerns about a lack of working class actors. Now leading playwright Jim Cartwright is doing something to fix the problem.

There is a “quiet revolution” taking place in acting, Cartwright says. And it is happening in a fitness studio above a charity shop on Chorley High Street in Lancashire.

This is where Cartwright, whose plays include The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and Road, holds three drama classes every Sunday. On Saturdays, he takes over a room in a Methodist church in Manchester.

He started the classes in 2015 after reading comments from Dame Julie, who said she would not be able to afford to become an actress if she was starting out again.

“It made me really cross because I’m from a working class background,” he says.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption L to R: Tom Hiddleston (Eton), Eddie Redmayne (Eton), Benedict Cumberbatch (Harrow)

Reading articles about shrinking opportunities for those without money and connections made him “like a bull with a sore head”, he says. So his wife told him: “Don’t get angry. Do something.”

He took her advice and set up the drama studio with the aim of bringing through more working class talent, advertising his services in his local fish and chip shop.

“I got a little card saying ‘drama studio’ and stuck it on a chippy wall. And I waited. And they came, and they came, and they keep coming.”

Two years later, he has five classes in the two locations and has set up a talent agency to represent the budding stars. There is also a youth group.

Image copyright Ian Kay

Image caption Jolene Rathmill has found it hard to progress in the acting profession

The adult class members range from people who have never set foot on stage to jobbing actors who are honing their skills. There are students, retired people, a few teachers, a former policeman, a fireplace salesman.

Jolene Rathmill, 38, from Oldham, works for financial advisers and runs confidence and self-esteem workshops in schools.

She says: “When I first started, Jim got me an agent and wrote something about me, saying he’s worked with some of the top actresses in the world and that I have the potential to be that. He sees that in me. That’s my ambition, 100%.”

However, she thinks she is at a disadvantage because she hasn’t been to a prestigious drama school.

Image caption Cartwright’s groups are rehearsing for their next showcase in Manchester

“I grew up on a council estate. We had chicken wire between our gardens and a tyre swinging in our back garden,” she says.

“I feel that having not attended a professional, recognised drama school, initially you’re right at the bottom of the hierarchy. There’s a hierarchy of agents, and the top agents get the top castings, and further down the line if they want a real working class actor they might call people in.

“But it’s very rare, so you’re climbing, climbing, climbing” – she mimes climbing a ladder – “trying to get there. And it just doesn’t happen.”

Cartwright’s efforts come as privately educated actors like Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis seem to have taken over the TV, film and theatre landscape.

Image caption Cartwright made his name writing Road, which was filmed for the BBC in 1987

Last year, The Sutton Trust found that 42% of the winners in three main Bafta award categories had gone to people from private schools, while Sky News recently calculated that 45% of the BBC’s best-paid stars were also privately educated.

Also in 2016, researchers found that 16% of actors came from working class backgrounds – half the level of the population as a whole – and that the British acting profession was “heavily skewed towards the privileged.”

The Labour Party is now conducting its own investigation into opportunities for working class actors, with a report due to be published soon.

Cartwright has turned drama teacher after more than 30 years as one of the most vital voices in British theatre. His debut play Road is currently back at the Royal Court in London, where it launched his career in 1986.

He has also acted in TV shows like The Village, From Darkness and Coronation Street.

Image caption Cartwright is an acclaimed writer, actor, director – and now drama teacher

With the Cartwright Drama Studio, he hopes to replicate the “explosion of energy and talent” that came with the Kitchen Sink movement of the 1950s. That was fading by the 1980s, he says, when he noticed “the floppy fringe coming back”.

He says: “I’d never say it’s been an even playing field, but when I started out it was more even. But I’ve seen it change. I’ve seen it tilt.”

His students come from all sections of society. Some would identify as working class, some wouldn’t. But he believes the mindset is what sets his studio apart.

‘We’re a quiet revolution – and we’re coming’

“The working class thing is an attitude. It’s a burning, it’s a feeling inside,” Cartwright says. “That’s what came in the ’50s. It wasn’t just that they were from a particular area or a particular economic strata.

“They carried with them a certain fire. That’s what we’re building in the classes. We’re not just classes – we’re a bit of a movement really and we’re a quiet revolution.

“And we’re coming. If you won’t let us through the doors, we’re coming over the walls and through the stalls. We’re coming in, it’s time and anyone out there who feels the same as I do, join us, because it’s time for change in theatre. It really is time for change.

“Not that there’s not great work that goes on. There’s fantastic work and fantastic people working in this business. But something’s died that we’re reviving.”

Cartwright brings casting directors and agents to see his students perform at regular showcases. Some have won small film and TV roles and are working on their own theatre shows and short films. There are no stars yet – but he is sure some have the talent to go all the way.

“Some of the people who come to these classes are just amazing, and it’s criminal that they’re not working in the highest levels of this industry,” he says.

The class members include Darren Scott, 55, who worked as an actor for seven years before the work dried up. (He has spent the past 20 years as a primary school teacher.) For him, attending the Cartwright Drama Studio has rekindled his performing career.

“I was in the very first showcase that Jim directed, and through that I got an agent, and I had an audition with Mike Leigh for his new feature film. And after three recalls, I was lucky enough to be offered a part. That’s a direct result of coming here and working with Jim.”

At the age of 19, Emma Heyes has studied acting at college and is attending the classes in preparation for auditioning for drama school. In the meantime, she’s working on the checkouts at Tesco.

She has already had enough acting experience to know her accent puts her at a disadvantage.

“I have to learn accents; otherwise I won’t get work,” she explains. “I think I’ve only ever done one play where I’ve used my actual accent, and I’ve done a lot of plays.

“I’ve been into the top drama schools in the UK and they look at you as the novelty northerner in the corner.”

As part of the training, Cartwright tasks the group members with writing and performing monologues. He recommends one by 38-year-old Scott Brerton.

Brerton reads it and it is a bitter-sweet tale of trying to remember what happened on a big night out. It is exactly the sharp, funny, full-of-life voice that Cartwright is trying to encourage.

Brerton had not acted before he started coming to the classes six months ago. He has now been for his first audition and won his first role, performing in a three-night play in Liverpool last month.

“I don’t think I would have been able to do it or have had the confidence to do it without coming here and having that weekly inspiration and driving motivation by Jim,” he says.

It is early days for all concerned, and the “quiet revolution” may end with a whimper or a roar.

At any rate, Cartwright is on a mission to make it happen. In fact. he’s throwing the kitchen sink at it.

The next Cartwright Drama Studio showcase is at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on 31 July. Road runs at the Royal Court in London until 9 September.

Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].

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limejuicer1862 · 5 years

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F WORD WARNING

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

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Thursday Simpson

lives between Peoria, Illinois and Iowa City, Iowa. She is a writer, musician and cook. Her work has recently been anthologized in Nasty! Volume 2, Hexing the Patriarchy and Satan Speaks!. She believes in garlic, onions and Feline Satan. Her twitter is @JeanBava and her full publication history can be found at www.thursdaysimpson.com

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

When I was a kid and throughout highschool I always wanted to write. Mostly back then I would listen to Opeth’s album Damnation or Tiamat’s album Prey and try to come up with my own poetry but it never really happened. But eventually in 2008 I was enrolled in community college and playing in about 10 different bands. I wasn’t really happy playing music so I started thinking about writing again. One of the nice things about writing as opposed to film making or playing music is that there is no recording or filming process. It’s like pure expression, no strings, no tuning, no effects or cables. Sure, you need a laptop and there is always so much revision and study involved. And writing is such a more long term thing than music. A manuscript might take more than five years to go from draft number one to publication as opposed to an album getting written, recorded, mixed and released in a year or two. It’s not that one medium involves more or less work, they’re just different. And the process involved with writing really kind of seemed attractive to me back then. I could sit and read and then write on my computer and email my work to publications instead of constantly practicing and trying to get my riffs recorded on good audio and find a label’s mailing address and trying to get their attention and going on the road and all of that.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

There are several things that do come to mind, though. Growing up in Galesburg, Illinois one hears a lot about Carl Sandburg. He was born here and a lot of things are named after him. I actually won a poetry contest in the 7th grade put on by his estate and his daughter gave me the prize at a ceremony held at his birthplace.

I think also in the 7th grade our class did a poetry unit where we read poets like Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes and Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe. Looking back on that now, it’s so weird. It was a Catholic school, so we were getting all of this militant right wing anti abortion politics, books like Harry Potter were banned.But we also read poets like Nikki Giovanni and learned about Oscar Romero.

Then once I was in public highschool, I think I started to hear people talk about poetry as something one did to express themselves. Or as a valid art form unto itself. Some people from my highschool used to get together both in person and online and workshop eachother’s poetry. They were who told me about Sylvia Plath and poets like that.

But it was really more professors at my community college that made it start to click for me. One guy was an eldergoth from the 80’s and also used to play music before he became a writer. He really helped me take poetry as something I wanted to do and turn it into something that I did. He taught, “America,” by Allen Ginsberg in class one day and I went out and got a copy of Howl. The title poem, Howl, really fucking blew me away. I think that’s the poem that really made me fall in love with poetry.

3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

At first, very much so. That’s all we were taught in community college. The only non intro lit course was a two part Fall-Spring British Lit survey. I really didn’t like Beowulf or Canterbury Tales or the The Faerie Queene. I loved Shakespeare but didn’t really like Donne and Marvel and etc etc.

And after a month or two of the Enlightenment guys, I really fell for Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and the Shelley’s. I read their stuff for the better part of Spring 2010. Then a friend of mine that recently graduated from Western Illinois University asked me to help her run a local writing workshop. And while we were hanging out and planning it she showed me all of the texts they worked on at Western and let me borrow Richard Siken’s book, Crush. And after reading him I fell in love with poetry all over again.

Then once I transferred to the University of Iowa to finish my BA I chose a poetry writing course based on the instructor teaching Siken and Frank O’Hara. The Writers Workshop offers a series of creative writing courses for undergrads that anyone can take. And the instructors are all graduate students currently enrolled in the Workshop. We also studied Jeffrey McDaniel and the Dickman Twins and people like that. She also directed me to poets like Sharon Olds, James Wright, Franz Wright.

In other classes in the English literature department we read people like James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson and Mary Swander and Raymond Carver and Jane Smiley.

During my last Semester there, Spring 2013, I started reading Maggie Nelson. She was around Iowa City for a bit in 2010 or 2011, guest lecturing and things like that, while she was publishing her book, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, through University of Iowa Press. So by 2013 everyone in Iowa City was reading Bluets. That book really changed my life. I read everything else Maggie Nelson wrote and then read every author she cited in her work, Simone Weil, Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller.

Then after reading authors like Dodie Bellamy and Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus I started making friends that shared a love for similar writers. And then I more or less started getting plugged into communities of actual contemporary writers my own age doing the coolest fucking shit.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

It varies! I hate doing the same thing every day. But, I do prefer to write in the morning, first thing. I always hydrate first thing every morning. I’m obsessed with drinking water. Then I either make breakfast and a pot of tea or coffee or just start in on whatever project I’m working on. The longer each day goes on the more shit comes up. And I really need to focus when I write. So I like to get it out of the way first thing. Then it always isn’t in the back of my mind as I do everything else during the day.

In general I try to pattern my work ethic after my favorite athletes. Interviews with Kevin Durant or DeMarcus Cousins or Nyla Rose have taught me so much about what it takes and what it looks like to pursue greatness.

5. What motivates you to write?

I think it’s almost always been work that I admire. Sometimes it’s an interpersonal thing, a breakup or a great hookup or whatever. But almost always it’s because I’ve seen a great film or read a great book or watched a great professional wrestling match or athletic contest.

I really like raw, physically immediate work that takes real risks. That’s why I love pro wrestling so much. It’s such a physical, emotional form of storytelling. A great match from Mitsuharu Misawa in a lot of ways reminds me of a novel like The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich or Like Being Killed by Ellen Miller. Or more recently, Tessa Blanchard’s match with Sami Callihan. Tessa really connects with the audience with her tears and really honest cries of pain throughout that contest. That same feeling and emotion is present in Colt Cabana’s recent title defense against James Storm or in just about anything that Pentagón Jr. and his brother, Fénix do in the ring.

Same with the New Day, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods and Big E. I think they’re just about the most talented artists working in professional wrestling throughout this entire decade. There is so much artistic brilliance in their matches with the Uso’s or in Kofi Kingston’s main event work in 2019.

Besides wrestling, films like Night of the Living Dead by George Romero or Living Dead Girl by Jean Rollin really direct my artistic goals. Something raw, real, honest and immediate and emotionally and psychically potent. That’s what I’m always trying to chase and pursue in my own work.

6. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I think my passion for literature and video games and athletics and film have always been more or less intertwined. When I was about 5 or 6 I started watching the Universal Monster Collection on VHS and got obsessed with horror. I read all of the Goosebumps and Fear Street books from the Galesburg Public Library. I watched the Star Wars films on VHS and then read all of the Star Wars books at the public library. I watched Tales from the Cryptkeeper and Are You Afraid of the Dark and read all of the affiliated franchise novels that the library had.

I first became aware of professional wrestling after renting WWF Royal Rumble on the Sega Genesis. In 1993, 1994 and 1995 the only way to watch wrestling for me was from renting VHS tapes. So anytime I got any money I would rent as many wrestling tapes and horror films as I could afford and watch them over and over.

I didn’t have a computer or access to the Internet until 1999. So mostly every second of my free time was either spent at the library researching films and books or at rental stores reading the VHS boxes.

Crying is a really important spiritual activity for me. Victor Wooten defines crying as something we do when we aren’t able to express our emotions through language. I’ve always cried a lot, regardless of age. My favorite thing to do on my days off is to make a pot of coffee and listen to music or watch a film or listen to an audiobook and cry my fucking eyes out.

The video game Final Fantasy 7 really changed me. I played it fairly soon after it came out in 1997. I became so obsessed with the game. I cried when I played it and I cried thinking about it when I wasn’t playing it. The way it combines such lyrical music with so many incredible greens and blues in the color pallet just really connected with me. I read the strategy guide cover to cover so many times. Video game strategy guides were actually one of my favorite literary genres as a kid. I never owned too many games, but I could afford the strategy guides. So I just read them cover to cover, over and over.

So much of what I do now is born directly out of my obsessions from when I was a child. An interest in Universal Horror led to an interest in the 80’s slasher franchises, that fed into an interest in George Romero’s body of work and so on. Then once I was in college and started to learn about politics and theory and history, horror was such a perfect exploration ground. George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead became a renewed obsession. I started thinking of 80’s slasher films as Reagan morality tales.

Coming out of the closet and living publicly as queer and trans for me was very much tied to learning about AIDS in the 1980’s. Reagan’s policies really effected my family in a lot of negative ways. Rick Perlstein wrote a really great two volume work that traces changes in right wing politics from Eisenhower through the 1976 Republican Convention. Those books were such great companions to The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy or I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and In One Person by John Irving. Artists like David Wojnarowicz tie so many things together. My mind has always worked in a language of synchronicity and probability and chance and myth. Things like Baseball statistics have always been incredibly meaningful to me. And the way David Wojnarowicz ties things like country music to masculine queerness really made me feel validated as a thinker for the first time in my life.

And during times when I really thought my writing was over and out, especially in late 2012 and late 2013, watching Are You Afraid of the Dark and some of John Carpenter’s films like They Live and Prince of Darkness really helped get my mind and heart together again. The same with 1931’s Frankenstein. I watched that film over and over as a child. But when I watched it during the fall of 2014 it was like seeing it for the first time. Boris Karloff’s performance is just something special. His unhinged screams during the fire at the end of the film really effected me in a profound way. You can watch that film alongside reading Chris Kraus’ novel, Summer of Hate, and learn a lot about violence in our society.

So yeah, the obsessions and concerns in my work now are very much reflected in my obsessions and concerns as a five year old.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

There are so many! I think more than anyone, my favorite contemporary writers are Ariel Gore, Tiffany Scandal, Erika T. Wurth, Juliet Cook, Leza Cantoral, Christine M. Hopkins, Kristen J. Sollee, Joanna C. Valente, Nadia Gerassimenko, Juliet Escoria, Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins, Monqiue Quintana, I could go on forever.

Helen Oyeyemi is a genius. Sybil Lamb is a genius. Patrisse Khan-Cullors is a genius.

I also like Koji Suzuki’s novels. Edward Frenkel is another favorite. Karyn Crisis is writing and publishing a series on traditional Italian witchcraft that is excellent. And I do enjoy Haruki Murakami as well. Marisha Pessl is another favorite.

More than anything, I love how publishing is changing. Ebooks and audiobooks and the Internet are opening up so much to so many people. You no longer need to live in New York City or go to college to have access to a life in literature.

Technology is making literature accessible and possible for disabled persons as well. You don’t need a ton of shelving and space to store your books, you can read / listen while you cook or work or whatever. An average SD card can hold about 5 public libraries worth of books.

In general I just love where contemporary literature is right now and hopefully where it’s heading. Art seems more accessible than it’s ever been.

8.1. Why are they genius?

Helen Oyeyemi’s book, “White is For Witching”, is a novel that is as expertly written as it is affecting. I love books that aren’t fixed. Those Comp 101 tropes of, “Reliable narrator, unreliable narrator,” or, “Now class, to write well, we must first prepare an introductory paragraph with our thesis statement,”

Just turn me off.

I love it when an author jumps deep into the psychic mass of human bodies. The psychic and physical realities of humans don’t correspond at all to those 101 concepts.

And Oyeyemi’s, “White is For Witching,” to me is just about the perfect book. Everything in the narrative is always changing. Every sentence just feels so profound and impactful. It really challenges the reader to kind of move beyond the literal text and engage with the narrative more with one’s psychic senses or within one’s innermost being.

Sybil Lamb’s book, “I’ve Got a Timebomb”, is a novel that, to me, recalls Kathy Acker’s non-linear style. But Sybil’s novel specifically frames Acker’s queer, disjointed virtuosity within a transgender, W. Bush era framework.

As with Oyeyemi’s, “White is For Witching,” its rather difficult to get a sense of what’s happening, sentence to sentence. And that forces the reader to both rely on the depth of the language itself and also on their own psychic ability to sense what is happening. And as the novels continue, they each create such a powerful impact and resonance within the reader. Or at least they did with me. They changed my fucking life.

And Patrisse Khan-Cullors book, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” is one of the most profound works I’ve ever read. It’s in part memoir and part contemporary history. I think if someone was only going to read one book published in the 2010’s, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” is a book that person should choose.

I think for a lot of white people in the United States, we really ignore what’s going on around us. We don’t confront our white privilege. We don’t confront that our white privilege is sustained by institutional racism. We don’t confront that horrific violence is forced on people of color.

Throughout her book, Patrisse Khan-Cullors candidly talks about her life and the lives of those around her. And through her writing, she almost kind of gives the reader a choice. By describing the horror and violence of racism, the reader can either choose to be horrified and repent and commit to change or they can continue to block it out.

The narrative also is about the author’s journey as a queer person. She talks about the realities of being queer in highschool and being queer as an adult.

I think, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” is a book that has incredible power. If anyone doubts the ability of literature and narratives to change lives, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” can shake them from that complacency.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

So, I think for me writing is the most accessible art form. You can do it alone, you don’t have to have a lot of friends or a lot of gear and money and things like that. You don’t have to go buy a guitar and learn how to tune it and replace your strings or learn about what a sine wave and a square wave are and etc etc.

You can go out and read books from your library or find ebooks and audiobooks online and dive in and start getting inspired. Also, libraries carry a ton of ebooks and audiobooks besides physical books. And if there’s something you want that they don’t have, they can almost certainly get it for you.

There’s no equivalent with guitars and drum machines and synthesizers. You kind of have to buy them or maybe at best rent them from a music store. And renting in that context costs money.

But libraries also have laptops you can rent for free and write on. You could base your entire writing career out of a public library if you couldn’t afford books, an internet connection or a computer.

You can just start reading and see what inspires you and go pursue it.

The Internet really helps one connect to other readers and writers and is such an excellent way to find and build communities.

Though, I don’t mean to act like writing is high up on the platonic list of ideal art forms. I live a fairly monastic life and I enjoy that way of living. Writing is a long term game. It takes months and more often than not years to write and draft and edit and revise and get rejected and get rejected and write and revise. It appeals to my temperaments.

And revising is as simple as reading and re-reading, deleting, re-framing, re-stating, seeking clarity and things like that. You don’t have to listen to abunch of audio on abunch of expensive equipment and twist and turn abunch of knobs and worry about re-recording a part or how something’s mixed or anything like that.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

More than anything else, one becomes a writer by first reading and then writing and then going back and editing what one has written. The hardest parts about being a writer have more to do with time, money, stress management, real life shit.

When I was living in Iowa City, some of the best advice I got came from reading the memoirs of writers and artists that I admire. Especially Jeanette Winterson and David Lynch and Ann Patchett.

It’s easy to see ourselves as these nobodies and our heroes as deities. But just to share a small part of Jeanette’s story. After she was kicked out of her parents house for being gay, she used to go to the library every day and get books to read. Back then she thought it was required to read every text in alphabetical order, so she started with the first book in the A section and started working her way down the lines.

Eventually a librarian noticed her habits and told her that she can read any book she likes at anytime. That no one is required to only read books in alphabetical order.

I bring this story up because our crisis’ really hurt. When we lose a job, we feel like it’s the end of the world. When we go through a breakup we feel like it’s the end of the world.

And we feel like that because things really fucking hurt.

But one thing we don’t realize sometimes is that our heroes, the pillars of art, have gone through the same things we’ve gone through. David Lynch had to put Eraserhead on hold for more than five years because he was broke. He talks in his memoir, Catching the Big Fish, about going every day to the local Big Boy and drinking a milkshake while he thought about his ideas.

You have to imagine David Lynch not as the creator of Twin Peaks, but as a broke twenty something loser hanging out at the fast food restaurant every afternoon, starring off into space, dreaming about someday making movies.

Professional, capitalist culture teaches us that such dreams are shameful. We’re all taught to laugh and scoff or at best feel sorry for the girl heading out to LA to become an actress or the person living in their parents basement working on their first demo.

The hardest part about being a writer is learning to not give into all of that shame. A lot of people will talk a lot of shit about you. That will only ever increase in its intensity as you publish and do your thing.

Once, I sent a story to a publication and paid 3 dollars to have the editor give me personalized feedback. And this fucking guy sent me his feedback by gleefully ripping my work to shreds, sentence by sentence.

A couple of weeks later, that exact same piece helped me get accepted into a nationally recognized MFA Program with an offer including full funding.

I didn’t accept the offer because I hate college, but that’s a different story.

The point I’m trying to make is that you just have to never give up. Ever.

Read the books that interest you.

When you get an idea for a piece, write it.

And finish it.

No matter what, finish what you start. No matter how hard it is. You can always edit it later.

Then after you finish writing something, read some more books that interest you. Watch films that interest you. Pursue anything that interests you.

And read books that maybe don’t interest you. And read the books that interest the authors you really like. Read people’s bibliographies. Get the books referenced in their research and read them.

And everytime you get an idea, make a note about it. And when you have time, work on it and do the best job you can.

I think doing one’s best is great advice. Whenever you’re writing, just do the best you can. If you don’t have time to write, just make sure you write when you do have time.

Never give up and always do your best.

That’s where editing really comes in. There isn’t a writer that’s ever lived who doesn’t have to revise their work. In the moment, things seem so impossible. Our sentences always feel so bad.

But one thing you’ll notice, if you don’t give up, is that six months or so after you finish a draft, you’ll come back to it and see what you need to change.

And then six months or so after that, you’ll come back to your piece and see more things that you can improve.

Sometimes that six months only takes a few days or a few weeks. Sometimes it might take a few years. Writing can be a very mysterious process.

That’s why no matter what, you should always just do your best each time you’re sitting down to write. Do your best and let the gods sort out the rest.

If you want to go to college to study literature and writing, go for it. If you don’t want to do that, don’t.

If you like workshopping with other people, do it. If you don’t like it, your editors will let you know what you need to change and how to improve your work.

Some of my favorite writers are highschool dropouts and some of my favorite writers have multiple PhDs. The secret to writing is figuring out your own process and investing in it and devoting yourself to the work of reading and writing and editing and revising. And most importantly, the secret to writing is never giving up. Ever.

When people tell you that your work is shit, just move on. Never delete or destroy your own work. Just file it away and revise and edit it later on.

And I think it’s also important to be open to change. Both changes in your style and changes in your methods and changes in what interests and motivates you.

You might find that you start out writing poetry but want to write more fiction. Or you might start out wanting to write scathing, sexy queer non fiction but end up writing high fantasy novels.

Go with your gut.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I’m in the process of finishing up a novel that’s tentatively called, “Like a Razor.” It’s mostly about a young, out of work mathematician dealing with the loss of his primary partner in a polyamorous relationship. There is also a lot of professional wrestling & Satanism related esoterica and mystery involved.

I’m also working on putting together a couple poetry collections. And hopefully also a non-fiction collection dedicated more to examining spirituality and strategies for activism.

And hopefully all of these works will have a soundtrack that I’ve composed and recorded myself.

Thank you so much for this opportunity! I very much appreciate it

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Thursday Simpson F WORD WARNING Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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limejuicer1862 · 5 years

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

Heather Derr-Smith

is a poet with four books, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award (Persea Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Fence, Crazy Horse and Missouri Review. She is managing director of Cuvaj Se, a nonprofit supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and divides her time mostly between Iowa and Sarajevo, Bosnia.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I often say my inspiration to write poetry came from the movie Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. I remember that film as instigating me to make a declaration of knowing how I wanted to live my life and what I wanted to “do.” It was an epiphany. I wanted to be one of the angels, listening and observing, but also I wanted to be like the angel who chose to become human to experience the world, fall in love even with all its pain. I realized I loved the world. I realized there was a world outside of myself to love. This was a coming of age moment for me, at about sixteen.

But also I was inspired all along by language, a fascination with words, a desire to create a self that had been fractured by trauma in childhood and into adulthood. I have early memories of writing every word I knew all over the church bulletin. There was scripture and gospel songs with weird images and the preaching. I hated my religious upbringing for its authoritarianism and it’s deep immorailty as it paved the way for what we see now in Trump. But the language of the scripture and the hymns I loved very much.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Our home had no books, no literature. My parents came from poverty, were the first generation to rise out of poverty, but were not college-educated. My mother drove the right-wing religious climate in the home, and she and my stepfather drove the right-wing political in concert. I’d say the psalms were he first poems I heard. But I do remember an antique book my mother had called “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and I believe a poem I loved about having to go to bed early in summer when it’s still light out and the birds are singing and you want to play. But my first introduction to poetry in the sense we think of it had to have been the Smiths, with “Keats and Yeats are on your side–but Wilde is on mine.” which led me to ask who are Keats and Yeats? There was literature in school which I did love. The usual books we were required to read in middle school and into high school. I loved those. But I really loved the literature I found through the music I loved–The Stranger by Camus, from the Cure as another example. I found so much through references in the music of the time (the 80’s) but also I wrote poems based on song lyrics, impressionistic, associative, and to me these fragments which were based on song lyrics were my poems.

3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

I had no older poets until I finally got to the University of Virginia. I ran away from home, was homeless for a while, got an apartment, waited tables, found my way to one year of Liberty University (the only way I could imagine going to college) then transferred after a year to the University of Virginia. Charles Wright, Rit Dove, and Greg Orr were teachers then. I had no idea who they were. You had to apply to get into their undergraduate workshops. I did and got in and started writing poetry. I knew nothing. I did not know the graduate students. I wasn’t very well educated because I had endured so much trauma in high school in and out of the home, that I really wasn’t learning much formally. I only knew my teachers, who I loved; my peers, who I also loved; and I got to know poets in books: Philip Levine, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had no idea what it was all about. I just knew if you were a poet you were supposed to go to Iowa, so I applied and went.

There I loved my teachers, Mark Doty and Marvin Bell especially, Jorie Graham. The ones I didn’t love I still learned from. I did not know any other poets outside of class. I didn’t got to AWP. There was no social media.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I have notebooks I keep in a stack on a table in my bedroom. Each notebook is labeled with projects I’m working on. One is “Arabic” for learning arabic, “Bosnian” for writing poems in Bosnian, “french” for writing poems in french. Then titles of book projects “Heathen” for gender identity stuff. “Violence” for exploring ideas about violence in writing–boxing, war–resistance etc. I have a “commonplace book” which is fragments and notes from my reading. I do not write every single day, but I am mindful of always engaged in the process of writing. I trust my mind and heart to be absorbing, listening, taking in, attentive to the world. I take notes when I want to remember something specific, and I do my notebooks regularly enough–maybe just 15 minutes a day for a few days or a couple days out of the week, and over time I have a compilation of ideas, themes, lines, words, images, etc. There’s always something connected to writing that I do every day because it’s all connected to writing–watching a film, reading the news, corresponding with friends or loves, looking at art, listening to music, loving my animal friends, al of it goes into my work. I just strive for balance like breathing–taking in and breathing out, active creation and restful re-creation.

5. What motivates you to write?

It seems to be something I have to do and was born to do. It feels inherent to me and myself. It feels like a whole way of being.

6. What is your work ethic?

I work hard. I love to work. I’m satisfied in my labor. At first I would have been driven to work in my home life with chores and a high level of parentification–a drive to meet the emotional and psychological needs of the adults around me, which meant trying hard to please and trying hard not to get in trouble. Then I revolted against the abuse at home and said “Fuck this!” and left. But with my friends who had also experienced a lot of trauma, were runaways, homeless etc. we created our own families and had to work. We were so young, 15, 16, 17 and up. And it wasn’t perfect and we retraumatized one another in many ways, but it was honestly better for my spirit and my mind and heart than homelife had been.

So I found a way to be proud of my own labor and that has stuck with me. Now I’m 48 and I am a big big believer in NOT doing things. I believe in canceling, saying no, not leaving the house, and not being “productive.” I believe in naps, sitting quietly, and snuggling the dogs. I still like being productive and working hard but I do not like striving at all. Striving to “make it” that feeling that this could “lead to something” bigger, better. Nope nope nope.

I spent some time in an Amish-mennonite community and I liked the idea of work as sacramental, mopping floors, working in the garden, caring for children and animals and others as a way of connecting and loving, not trying so much to amass wealth or be “productive” in the capitalist sense. That has stuck with me.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

Sylvia Plath’s rage and violence are still something in my poems that I’m interested in exploring. Berryman’s weird syntax which also connects to Shakespeare and the Bible. Charles Wright’s similes and metaphors and stringing together images with a colloquial bit of diction, with a quote from a philosopher. Larry Levis’ “I” who is deeply empathetic and wanders ut from his own self into the wider world.Mark Doty’s ethics and authenticity of emotion. These are all things still with me.

8. Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I admire so many. I think it would be impossible to name them, they just keep coming. Twitter has been a boon and a curse. I’ve managed to curate my twitter in such a way that I am surrounded by a really wonderful, diverse, generous, community of writers at all stages in their callings. I learn from all of them every day. I hate to name names because then I will leave someone out. There are at least hundreds, if not thousands. It’s a little overwhelming. But certain books have been particularly groundbreaking for me in the last couple years. I would say Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is one, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket fantastic is another and Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency. Those three have just blown open so many doors I want to hang out a while in those rooms.

9. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I keep working on my non-profit, Cuvaj se/Take Care. I’ve chosen to spend a great deal of my time and energy the last few decades facilitating poetry workshops in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and communities affected by trauma and violence. I started back in 1994 while I was learning about poetry and the war in Bosnia was culminating in genocide. I went over to volunteer in a refugee camp and I made a lifelong commitment to that country through more than twenty years of ongoing recovery. All of my earnings from poetry go into this work and all of the work has been self funded, and expanded to other countries, including Syria, and most recently Ukraine. I started the non-profit so that I could apply for grants to help build capacity and do more. We do poetry workshops that emphasize lgbtq rights, human rights, interethnic cooperation, migrant rights, critical thinking etc. and we also fund writers with grants to support their work, fundraise for emergency/critical financial support, and translation. Donations to Cuvaj se from individual donors always goes directly to writers or students in need to support their work. Running a non-profit is new to me, and I’m learning as I go and I’m taking it slow. https://cuvajse.org/

My fifth manuscript is to be published in 2021, but I can’t say anything more about that yet! There’s a lot in it about gender, seuality, violence, and God, my familiar themes (or demons? I like that use of a familiar) I remain obsessed with. But I am happy for the amount of time I have to really dig in hard with revisions and to make it the strongest book I can write. I don’t move on to the next book until I get the present one published–so every bit of my energy and strength will go into it.

I’m also having so much fun making poetry videos. I was hugely inspired by Agnes Varda and have been making these little clips of poems, readings, with sometimes goofy video. I love it and I want to take a film class and learn how to make more and better ones. I don’t care if they are amateurish or seem unpolished. I learned from Agnes varda just to do what you love and give your heart to it and learn as you go. I think this is the link to subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChhjf1Vp_5o6siKsuhv_G0A?view_as=subscriber My poetry website is here: https://heatherderrsmith.com/

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Heather Derr-Smith Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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